


We Don't Fight Fair

by OphelieduLac



Series: We Don't Fight Fair [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Adventure, Black and Grey Morality, Dark Humor, F/M, Gen, Revolution, Slow burn doesn't cover it, Some canon minor characters are getting actual personalities for the first time ever., Strap yourselves in my friends because this is gonna be a long ride, Subtly and not-so-subtly pushing back on the sexism in One Piece, The dumbass author injects realism into her favorite piece of escapism, Trauma, Violence, War, and frankly it's not the focus, and plays up the themes of classism too, more tags to come
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-03-11 07:29:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13519413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OphelieduLac/pseuds/OphelieduLac
Summary: When the most active decision you’ve ever made is to run away from your own execution, maybe it’s time to re-think your life. Or, lay low and avoid conflict. Or even just pull together a Good Plan and get the hell outta there.Stevett Mara is not known for her Good Plans. And boy, do Tuesdays suck.





	1. Part I: Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Do you like gallows humor and an examination of the logistics of the show’s Revolutionary Army? Have you ever wanted to read a story that’ll (attempt to) toe the fine line between the established tone of One Piece and an actual war story? Want it all written by a nerd who gets her best ideas when she’s slinking into a depressive, procrastinatory funk? Well, boy-oh-boy, have I got a story for you.
> 
> You’ll find an explanation/apology at the end of the work, if you’re looking for one.

There are some days when Sengoku regrets accepting his promotion to Fleet Admiral. This is one of them. 

Since he awoke, he’s extinguished three proverbial fires resultant from Fisher Tiger’s still-recent rebellion, put out an _actual_ fire, gained two Garp-shaped holes in his wall, patched up two similarly Garp-shaped holes in his wall, spilled an entire packet of rice cracker crumbs over his new carpet, missed a call from Rosinante, and fielded three more irate ones from the Elder Stars regarding the Celestial Dragons.

It’s safe to say, as he arrives at the stack of papers regarding the state of the world, that he’s had it up to here with today, and if he could just unplug from the shit-storm that is the rest of the world right now, that would be great.

The first three manila-foldered intelligence reports are problems easily solved: deploy more Marines to various locations across the Grand Line as necessary; demote underperformers as necessary; and his signatory approval for the completion of the suppression of the White Town, which had begun last year. 

_Dreadful business, that last one, but it must be done._

The next folder on the pile is an intervention request, filed by a group of concerned citizens on the Marlena Archipelago in South Blue. The ongoing civil war between the two biggest Noble houses in the country, they said, is threatening to destroy them all—the harvests were ruined through each side’s scorched-earth tactics, commoners were press-ganged into service, and the petitioners feared that the children would be conscripted next. The war, now entering its fifth year, seemed like it would swallow up the whole island. 

Sengoku feels the contents of his stomach shift a little, restless in guilt; he’d only just yesterday approved the two nonintervention requests from the two Noble Houses, Bergmilla and Corteed. Both families had poured a lot of money into Navy weapons innovation, and it would’ve been difficult to openly refuse their demand. Moreover, it was a contained war, unlikely to spill over into other islands and destabilize South Blue. 

After all, it began over a dispute about a lamp. 

It was just one island in a manageable sea—the war meant, though, that pirates were less likely to pillage it, deterred by the questionable domestic situation. So, Sengoku arrives at a compromise, throwing the Marlena report to the completed pile and dashing off a memo to send to both Houses: Restrict the fighting to the rainforest, and the Navy will not intervene.

_There. That ought to assuage the citizens somewhat._

Fighting off the headache that seems to be oncoming when he looks at the rest of the pile, Sengoku reaches for the next intelligence report. 

(Miles away, on the edge of a rainforest, a young girl is dragged away from the corpses of her parents, kicking, screaming, protesting that she lied about her age.)

The second time that Sengoku sees an intervention request regarding the Marlena Archipelago cross his desk, he has bigger things to worry about than an ongoing, self-contained civil war in South Blue; namely, the Minion Island Operation, with Rosinante’s psychotic brother smack in the middle of things. Sure, Tsuru’s got it handled, but the Donquixote Family are a slippery, unpredictable lot who have evaded them thus far. If there’s one thing Sengoku knows how to deal with, it’s pirates. Pirates are the real enemy, the real threat to the continued safety of the seas and the people who live in this world.

He never notices which report his goat chooses for a snack. 

(A malnourished child retches on a piece of fruit; it’s by far the worst thing she’s ever tasted. The man in front of her shifts his electric prod just the slightest bit, and she knows she can’t spit it out.)

The third time that an intervention request from the Marlena Archipelago crosses his desk, it’s not about the civil war—that had been over for two years. The brief is stamped with a red ‘URGENT’ and comes as a joint filing from the Bergmilla and Corteed Houses. 

Sengoku doesn’t exactly have a choice in acting on it. 

\---

The worst events in Mara’s life always happen on a Tuesday.  

The disastrous end to the War? That was a Tuesday. The agonizing death of one of her closest comrades? A Tuesday. Her conscription? Hell, she doesn’t know, but it was probably a Tuesday, too. 

Now that she’s being marched up to an execution block on a cliff overlooking the bay, it’s only fitting that she realizes what day of the week it is. 

The six of them are tied together like a chain gang; Kana’s at the front, head of sleek (with grease, Mara knows now) black hair held high as always, and Mara’s bringing up the rear, trying and likely failing to project the same kind of confidence. Without realizing it, the Marines have lined them up in order of age. 

It’s the order they’re going to die in, too. 

Judas, in front of her, is hacking up a lung, shaking the metal chains every time he tries to brace his cough. Their jailers had taken Last Requests half an hour ago, and while Kana’s had been a detailed explanation of how the authority figures in question could go about sodomizing themselves with their own guns, the boy ahead of her had asked for a cigarette; too asthmatic to ever dare, he figured his last hour on this Earth would be a great time to try one. 

She’s pretty sure that she just saw him hack up blood, but honestly, that’s the least of their worries. 

There’s a crowd that’s accumulated in front of the scaffold— definitely sizeable. No surprise, given that their activities had drawn some serious attention these past few months— the assassination of the local Marine captain, the destruction of the Skyline Promenade, these were acts that all made people sit up and pay attention to them. 

Shame it took all that kinda shit to get them to listen. But what else could they do, when they’d been starving in the streets in the name of the Nobles’ comfort and ease and whim? 

The mob hurls curses upon them, like the six of them weren’t already subject to some bad mojo already— beyond their current predicament, beyond their checkered, frayed pasts, they’d been betrayed by one of their own. 

That stung the worst.

With a few prods from the Marines directing them, they make it to the block and are faced out to the crowd— she’s been spat on a number of times, and can see that someone’s stuck pink gum into Linke’s dark purple hair. 

“Good citizens of the noble Marlena Archipelago!” The announcer begins— vaguely, Mara thinks he looks like a poisonous toad. “The Terror is over! Today, we gather to eradicate these insurgents who have wreaked havoc on our lives. After a long hunt, led by the Marines—”

“Mara!” A voice hisses.

Swinging her head to the right and tuning out the bloated rambling about the glory of the Marines and the World Government, she sees Roran leaning back behind the line of convicts, three people between them. She regards him questioningly. 

“Go.”

“What?”

“Get out. Live. I know you can.” His good eye is earnest and pleading, and she feels like a cold hand of seawater has gripped her lungs.

“Fuck off.” She grinds back, choking down the panic that’s bubbling up in her throat—if she thinks about it, she can’t do it like she planned. “I die with you all.”

“No, Mar—” but he’s cut off. They’re all cut off, thrust to their knees by the Marines who have come up behind them. Good thing today’s her last, since her kneecaps will be purpled and blue and it would hurt to walk soon enough.

“Their ringleader, Damereaux Kana!” A Marine with a pistol lines up behind the teenager, setting the end of the barrel against her head as whispers break out in the crowd like wisps of flame. “Any last words, girl?”

Mara closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Long Live the People!” Kana spits, and Mara doesn’t need to see her to know her green eyes are dancing with fire, “Death to the World Gov—” And a deafening bang and a thud cut her off and Mara feels a slight tug on the chains. 

She doesn’t open her eyes. She tries to ignore the whimpers and shakes from the others next to her. 

“The second-in-command, Velt Roran.” She hears the click of the gun’s hammer, closer this time. “Last words, boy?”

“No.” He chuckles bitterly.

Bang, thud. 

She’s shaking, she’s shaking, she can’t feel the telltale tug. But she doesn’t open her eyes. 

“Staffos Linke, the girl who masterminded the murder of Captain Richards.” Click.

“Fuck you.”

Bang. Thud. 

“Linke!” Her twin screams, and its high pitch hurts less than the broken tone of it. 

“Staffos Tank, who smuggled illegal weapons into the country.” Click.

“Fuck off!” He roars, his natural charm deserting him. 

Bang. Thud. 

They’re close now. Her shaking must be quaking the scaffold, but she doesn’t think they notice, too wrapped up in their _fun_. She longs to reach out and fumble in the darkness, to take the hand of the boy next to her and reassure him, but it seems that she’s having trouble uncurling her fists from where she’s dug her nails into the meat (if you could call it that) of her palms. 

“Damazar Judas, who built the weapon that destroyed the Skyline.” Click.

“C-Can I have another cigarette?” His voice is still high-pitched and young, maybe a tad scratchy. 

There’s a low murmur in the crowd, and for a second, Mara wonders if they’re gonna give him one. 

Bang. Thud. 

The pull of the chain is insistent. These ones are right by her ear. She opens her eyes, resolutely refusing to look to her right, to the slumped bodies of her comrades. Mara examines the crowd in front of her— as far as she can tell, it’s all Nobles and high-ranking peasants— people who don’t know the hardship they’d suffered, people who never fought in the War. Their faces blur together in her wet eyes. She doesn’t recognize them. At their sides, there are a few Navy foot soldiers either protecting or escorting them. Perhaps a bit of both. 

The press of wood behind her tells her there’s three men, between her and the cliff over the open expanse of bay.

“Stevett Mara, veteran of the War.”

She hears the metallic click, and feels the cool barrel press against the upper back of her head. She stops shaking. Sighs. Opens her hands slowly. 

“Your last words, girl?”

And relaxes her muscles.

She hears the gasps, the shrieks, feels the bullet fly above her, but none of that matters now, none of that. She’s out of her chains, her new appendages too small for the cuffs they’d fitted her with, rolling, rolling across the deck, away from the crowd, away from the bodies, weaving through legs. 

“Holy—“

“What?”

“What the fuck?”

“Magic!”

“No, a Devil Fruit!”

Mara keeps going, zigzagging to avoid the bullets from the Marines who’d gathered enough presence of mind to shoot at her. 

 _One last act of defiance._

And she’s still rolling when the ground disappears beneath her and the air rushes by her shell, so she switches back to see the open seawater rushing toward her with her human eyes. 

She smacks the water hard and militant inertia seeps into her bones. The bay takes her. 

\---

 _A plum,_ is Bartholomew Kuma’s first thought upon seeing the unconscious, waterlogged execution survivor. _A shriveled plum._

The creature that Hack had hauled out of the water is out cold but still alive, a fact more likely to do with the sheer bruising she sustained from smacking the water from a hundred feet up, than with any water she’d taken into her lungs. She’s a scrawny thing, visibly malnourished, visibly younger than anyone subject to an execution ought to be. 

The vigilantes in the rainforest-covered Marlena Archipelago had attracted the interest of the Revolutionary Army only two months earlier, with their destruction of the Skyline Promenade, the walkway the Nobles had built with slave labor to commemorate the end of the civil war instigated by the two largest Houses on the island.

Dragon had asked Kuma to take a team and establish contact with the perpetrators— the Archipelago was not especially politically volatile, but with the right prodding and a dose of luck, their leader reasoned, the Revolutionary Army could topple the Noble reign over the nation. Personally, Kuma thought that line of reasoning was perhaps too optimistic, but there was nothing wrong with meeting like-minded potential allies and Dragon’s instincts were usually a reliable source of direction. It was a pity that they were too late. 

“She’s the only survivor, Boss.” Monock Elena, his second, enters the infirmary with a quick glance at the child tucked under the blankets. “Stevett Mara’s her name, they announced each of them. Six of them, all kids, though it looked like she might be the youngest.”

“How did she escape?”

“She turned into an armadillo and rolled off the platform into the bay.”

“A Devil Fruit?” Kuma mulls this over for a moment. “A suicide attempt.”

Elena shrugs helplessly, scratching the skin at the base of her eyepatch. “The announcer called her ‘a veteran of the War.’ Maybe she just couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Then the rumors were true. They did use child soldiers.” He feels his blood boiling under his skin, the kind of righteous rage that had drawn him to Dragon’s side in the first place, the rage against the injustice of the Nobles’ machine. 

He reins it in, as he has done countless times before and will do countless times again. Any direct action taken against the Nobles in this moment would be counterproductive to the long-term goals of the Revolution, and would bring the Navy down on their heads before they’re prepared. Horrified as he is, wasting their resources on one small-scale event will do more harm than good. 

“Disgusting.” Elena’s sneer brings him back to the present. The woman’s face is scrunched up, her upper lip curling. “And we can’t do a damn thing yet, can we?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Aw, hell.” He watches his subordinate deflate, then fish a cigarette out of her pocket. “Then, what do you want us to do?”

“Don’t smoke inside.” He admonishes easily. “We wait until the girl wakes. Then we decide—it’s her country. I’ll take watch, it won’t be long.”

She takes a drag from her cigarette with a defiant look before answering, “Want me to report to the Big Boss in the meanwhile?”

“That would be appreciated.” He stifles an eye roll for Elena’s term for Dragon.

“You got it, Boss.” And with a toss of her platinum blonde hair and a strong whiff cigarette smoke, she swings on her heeled boots and exits the infirmary. 

“Smoke outside!” He calls at her retreating back, before settling into the chair in the corner of the room by the door, taking his Bible from under his arm and flipping open to the most recently earmarked verse—the book is littered with his scrawl, notes taken under salient points, underlining under turns of phrase that interest him, question marks next to concerns raised. 

He barely makes it two pages when the child starts rustling. Without moving his head from where he’s hunched over the book, he raises his eyes to glance at her. 

After a few seconds, wherein she sits up on the infirmary bed and scans the other side of the room with particular focus on the barred porthole window, he speaks, keeping his tone neutral to avoid spooking her, “I see you’re awake.”

The girl practically jumps out of her skin, then whips her head around to find the source of the voice. There are tears in her light eyes; perhaps a result of pain from the intense bruising. The look on her face, if he’s reading it right through its purple tinge, appears to be valiantly-concealed fear with a twinge of hope, an interpretation supported by the way in which she braces herself as if to flee, though doesn’t yet.

He continues, automatically bookmarking and closing his book when she says nothing, only holding his gaze for a long few minutes, “Quite a fall you took, Miss Mara.” Her eyes widen at her name, but he continues unabated. “Hack had to fish you out of the bay.”

“Where am I?” Her voice is pitched and bears a hefty amount of confusion, seasoned liberally with terror. 

“On board my ship, anchored near the port of Helena.” That is to say, on the other side of the island from the bay she’d apparently flung herself into.

“You saved me from execution.”

“Yes.” He responds to the non-question, “I make it a policy to save lives. I dislike suffering.”

“I tried to drown.” It’s a sentence said with little inflection, which makes him wonder about her mental state. _Pitiful,_ is the word that comes to mind. 

“You wouldn’t be the first person to prefer suicide over what the Marines call ‘justice.’” He thinks of countless former comrades, of innumerable men and women who’d taken their lives rather than become slaves to the Celestial Dragons. This girl similarly wears their fear and resignation around her like a blanket.

“All I had.” She mumbles, likely to herself, looking down at her hands, before her head whips up. Stevett Mara squints at him, hard, visibly scanning his face for what he presumes is a guess to his motives or his identity. He almost wants to laugh at the futility of it; his ability to maintain a blank visage routinely gives Dragon a run for his money. “And who are you?”

“My name is Bartholomew Kuma. I work for the Revolutionary Army. We’d been sent to observe and aid your group.” Her eyes practically turn into saucers before his eyes, and he finishes the thought with, “I’m sorry we were so late.”

She gapes at him, resembling particularly awestruck fish. Her amazement hangs in the air for a few seconds, before it disappears, her expression replaced with a particularly ugly sneer. “Don’t apologize,” she spits, venom boiling through her tone. “We were betrayed. It’s good you never met us, they woulda got you too.” Her rage is almost suffocating, and he marvels darkly at the sudden switch between the grief and raw wrath, that the world had hammered into her so early what he usually saw in seasoned soldiers.

It’s a realization that makes his blood sing with rage once more.

“How old are you, Miss Mara?” He tries piping kindness into his voice, to uncertain effect. 

The purpled girl in front of him draws herself up, projecting what he assumes is an attempt at confidence, bolstered by the spate of simmering rage, “I’m twelve.”

“Twelve?”

“Well,” And she glances to the side, almost sheepishly—looking her age, Kuma thinks, “I’ll be twelve on Thursday. But I’m basically twelve!”

“Do you have any family?”

She looks ready to shoot back a negative, but pauses and considers this for a moment. Then, “I have an aunt, I think. On the Zelda Isle.”

“Then we will take you to her.” 

“No!” She interjects, her voice rising in volume. Then, as an afterthought, more controlled this time, “No, thank you. I don’t know her and…” She trails off, biting her lip in unease, looking at the wall to her left. 

Kuma, though, gets the gist of why. He’s seen it before. So, he presses his hands to his knees, standing, “In that case, we can resolve this later.” His instincts tell him Elena’s standing on the other side of the door, waiting; that’s ideal, she has First Aid training. “I’ll send in someone to check you over, Miss Mara. It was nice to meet you.”

“…y-you too?”


	2. Part I: Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mara goes exploring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My weekend's gonna be kinda abridged, so expect an update around Wednesday/Thursday, procrastination permitting.

Bartholomew Kuma closes the door behind him as he leaves and Mara lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. 

She’s alive. 

Fuckin’ alive. 

And all alone. 

She turns toward the porthole window, imagining that it could show her the capital and its execution block, as if that weren’t on the other side of the Archipelago. Maybe she shouldn’t’ve tried to make a statement. Maybe she should’ve gone quietly, like the others. 

Almost immediately, her stomach turns violently, as if it wants to retch that passivity, to purge it from her system. It calms when she puts an end to that train of thought. She may not have used her power in the way Roran had wanted, but it seems like he’s getting what he wanted anyway. 

 _Asshole_ , she thinks with more fondness that she probably ought to, feeling her eyes get wet again. 

Derailing her own train of thought in the interest of self-preservation, though, Mara takes proper stock of herself, having been previously interrupted. Her clothes stick to her body, damp and itchy with salt residue. Her face and shoulders, as well as her knees, are sore— looks like she won’t escape those bruises after all. Seems like she’d hit the water at an angle instead of belly-flopping. 

Other than that, she seems to be pretty okay. Beyond the maw of sad darkness that’s crushing her ribs and swallowing her whole, of course. 

Man, there had been people who wanted to help them? Like Kana had said? Fuck, if they’d known this even an hour before the execution, maybe their silence on the way to the scaffold wouldn’t’ve been in resignation, but concentration. 

“Mara?” A low-pitched, scratchy, feminine voice cuts through the swirl of thoughts, and she swings her head up in the direction of the door, stowing her regrets for later. 

The speaker’s most noticeable features swim into her view— bright, bright platinum blonde hair, and a black eyepatch toward the left side of her head— and she dries her eyes to get a better look as the woman deliberately telegraphs a step into the room and toward the infirmary bed. She’s a tall, muscled woman with long hair and deeply-tanned skin, and a thin, angry scar running from her pointed chin, through her very-red lips, eye, and to her hairline, only interrupted by the eyepatch. Mara recognizes the lumps on her thighs as knife-holsters— no word on whether there were actual knives therein. 

“Yes?” And, as an afterthought, reminding herself that this is one of her rescuers, “Ma’am?” She may be a savage, but Roran had beaten gratitude into all of them, once upon a time.

“My name is Elena—no ‘ma’am’ necessary, please. Kuma asked me to make sure you’re doin’ okay.” Mara really appreciates that this woman’s keeping her hands palms out and in full view. “Mind if I check you over?”

She weighs her options briefly before steeling herself, “I’m-uh—good. I’m fine.” She pauses, then squints at her, “How d’you all know my name?”

“I was in the crowd, at the overlook— they announced it.” 

“O-Oh.”

The blonde woman takes this moment to sit down in the same seat that Kuma had previously occupied, legs crossed and both hands resting on the upper knee, visibly interlaced and empty. “And as soon as you flung yourself over the cliff, I called Hack and got him to swim over and fish you out.”

“Why?” Sure, Mara had Kuma’s answer, but Kuma seemed to be the director of the operation, while Elena had acted in the moment. Was she like him, then? She didn’t like suffering either?

“‘Why’ what?”

“Why’d you save me?” 

Elena recoils slightly, blinking at her in confusion with her eye, “What do you— do you know what I saw, back there?”

“Uhh…” Mara starts feeling a little sheepish and pretty embarrassed, “Me, jumping off a cliff?”

“I saw a probable Devil Fruit user running for the sea to avoid her own execution. I thought you might’ve wanted some assistance.”

“But you don’t know me!”

“Kiddo, you and your friends were fucking with the World Government.” The woman replies, her voice an aggressive deadpan, like this is something obvious. “Even if I hadn’t been sent, I would’ve helped, just for that.”

Mara feels something swelling in her chest, feels her face getting hot, “I guess, since you guys don’t like them either.”

“It’s easy to hate them when they do shit like this.” Elena’s expression is wry, tugging at the skin around her eye so that even more of the raw scar tissue is visible. It looks like whatever had destroyed her left eye had _hurt_. “How d’you feel?”

“Sore.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. On a scale of one to ten?”

“Uh, three.” It’s not _technically_ a lie; she’s had worse bruising, in worse places. Still hurts a lot, though. 

Elena nods, though something tells Mara that she doesn’t fully believe her, “I’ll get ‘em to get you some ointment, speed up the healing process. Wanna go wash off?”

A shower! The last time she’d showered had been a week before their arrest. Not even her extended dip into the bay had shed the layers of grime and sweat she’d built up; she still felt it, lingering in her pores, clinging to everything.

But…

“Look, Mara, you’re completely safe with us.” The woman continues, probably noticing her hesitance. “We ain’t gonna turn you in, or make you do something you don’t wanna.” There’s sincerity in her voice, and Mara, despite everything she knows about authority, _wants_ to trust her. Something in Elena’s demeanor feels familiar to her, almost like she’s a kindred spirit in more ways than just anti-Marine sentiment, or some shit like that. 

_Well, not like this day could get any worse._

“O-Okay. But I’ll kick your ass if you’re lying! I’ll do it!”

Which is how Mara finds herself following the taller woman out of the room, grimacing against the nascent kneecap bruises. 

_God, fuck the Marines._

The hallway is bare, wooded walls from floor to ceiling, much like the infirmary they’d left, with metal doors with portholes, evenly spaced out on each side. 

She stays about a foot behind Elena, watching her guide, the doors ahead, and the doors behind her, preparing for surprise attacks.

The first door to open, though, is in front of her, on the left side of the hall. She stops dead while a harried man clutching a wooden crate runs, panicked, up the hall to a different door on the other side of the hallway, using his shoulder to push his way through. Before the door closes behind him, she hears, “Alright, so I think I solved the fire—“

“Oh, good,” Elena huffs, turning to Mara with an eye roll like she’s letting the girl in on a joke. “Here we go again.”

“’Again?’ What?”

“Merick’s been trying to build some kind of machine for months now. Problem is, it keeps getting fucked up.”

“That’s hard?” She’d only ever seen Judas build a motor once, and he had always made everything look easy.

The woman shrugs, continuing her advance down the hall so that Mara must jog (owowowow) to keep up with her. “I dunno, I don’t know a thing about it. But every time he thinks he’s done it, something else goes to shit. This time it was spitting fire, last time it was ice, the time before that, it became sentient and tried to kill us all…really, it’s a mess.”

“That…sounds _bad_?” _What the hell kind of organization is this?_

The woman laughs, far too amused for the explanation she’d just provided, then chirps, “It’s why I’d rather punch my problems, honestly. Don’t need fancy tech for that.”

Mara can’t help but heartily agree. And plan to avoid Merick and his unholy creation for the duration of her stay. 

How long _is_ she staying?

They take a turn down another hallway, watch more people pass by between rooms, these times with packets and papers or Transponder Snails. A few pause to either smile or salute at Elena; none wear uniforms, but rather an assortment of dark clothes of varied lengths. One woman practically floats past in a floor length cloak with a serene smile on her face; a man in a skintight wetsuit runs down the hall in the other direction, mumbling something into the receiver of a Snail. 

Almost no one remarks on Mara’s intrusive presence in their midst; maybe one or two smile politely at her as they make eye contact, but overall, she likes the weird sense of purpose that she gets from being here, that everyone seems to emanate in their actions and deliberations. 

Her guide stops at the deserted end of their final corridor, opening the last door in the hallway to reveal a large tub in the middle of the windowless, sizable room with a few towels and a bottle of what appeared to be soap on its edge, and a few floor-length mirrors on one of the walls. 

“Here you go, kiddo.” Elena begins counting off on her fingers, like she’s going down a list. “We got ‘em to put some towels in there earlier; they’re still scrounging up some clean clothes for you—don’t worry about those, I’ll get ‘em—and I’ll sit guard out here, just so no one disturbs you—though I doubt anyone will.”

“Okay, then.” And Mara shuffles inside, latches the door, then triple-checks that it’s locked. She hears the thump of what she presumes is Elena sitting against the door, and does a quick check of the whole room to make sure no one else is in the room, either purposefully or by accident. Only then does she regard herself in one of the mirrors. 

Her face and shoulders are the first features to jump out; they’ve turned an ugly shade of purple, but even under the swelling she can see that her cheeks, probably supposed to reinforce an oval face shape, are somehow more hollowed than they had been the last time she’d properly seen her reflection. Her light brown eyes look almost beady in this distorted face; only the knowledge of their regular appearance keeps her from recoiling violently. Her knees, visible through her torn pant legs, are a lighter shade of purple; they probably hurt worse because they’re the ones subject to constant movement. 

Standing in stark relief through the purple, some of her old war wounds have gone white; stab wounds and slash wounds and phantom memories of bullets grazing her shoulders, which themselves seem to be the point where her skin stretches taut over both sides of her body.

Her hair sits in tangled, half-damp ropes, tossed in all directions over her head, darker than their usual shade of chestnut brown; she’ll have to work out the tangles with her fingers to get their original appearance back, let alone make it manageable. _Maybe I should just cut it all off, she thinks_ , already getting her hand caught halfway down one such rope. _Save myself the trouble._

 _Fuck, this is useless._ So, turning from the creature in the glass panel, she instead starts her bath, facing forward toward the door in case of an intruder. 

As time passes and her fingers prune in the soapy water that saps her strength—though certainly not to the same level as the salty water she’d flung herself into earlier in the day—she hears a knock at the door. 

“Mara?” Elena’s voice comes through the metal, “I’ve got some spare clothes for you—want me to pass ‘em in?”

“Uh, sure!” She yells back, scrambling first for a towel, then over to the door to unlatch it. The woman’s arm, balancing a pile of clothes and her sleeve pulled back slightly to reveal the beginnings of a tattoo, appears through a slight opening in the door. 

Mara takes them, and after toweling off, shucks them on: a dark blue shirt that hangs off her like she’s a coat hanger, and a pair of light blue jeans a size too big, but they’re better than the tattered, soaked clothes she’d come in with, which she carefully wrings out into the bathwater and folds up, planning to dry them for later. 

Exiting, she follows Elena back down the corridors, past the hustle and bustle of the ship, expecting to go back to the infirmary. However, Elena takes them past that particular door and up a flight of stairs, holding open the door at the top for Mara.

The bite of the salty ocean breeze hits her first; on its heels, its smell from all sides. The sun beats down hard overhead, its glare laden with memories of sunburned skin and blisters to which she no longer pays mind.

“If you wanna, you can hang your clothes to dry on the railing, there.” 

The girl shuffles to the indicated edge and does exactly that; it also gives her a view of the archipelago nation in the distance. The boat is the only thing around, anchored a mile or so from the coast while remaining within easy sight of the lush rainforest; its dark greens belie the rust-red stains she’d seen soak into the damp forest floor, never to fully come out. 

She turns back from the view, “Why’d you bring me out here?”

“Well, for starters,” The woman pulls a pair of dark sunglasses out of her jacket pocket, flicks them open, and slides them onto her face. It’s an odd look for a woman with only one eye, but Mara presumes that one-eyed sunglasses are hard to come by; if they weren’t, maybe Roran would’ve stolen a pair, “I wanted to show you that we ain’t gonna try to keep you down below, or against your will. If you want to go back, we’ll take you back. Words only go so far, y’know?”

Mara knows. Mara goddamn _knows._

“Hell, if you wanna leave now, the lifeboats are right over there.” She gestures behind her to a dark grey tarp over a lumpy, half-ovular object maybe fifty feet away. “I ain’t gonna stop you if you do.

“Anyway, I thought you might want some fresh air. Never does a body well to be cooped up.” Then, as an afterthought, “I also wanted a smoke break and people glare at me when I smoke below deck. It works out.” Elena fishes a pack of cigarettes from her other coat pocket and lights one up, sitting down against the ship’s mast. “Feel free to sit someplace, I’m gonna be here ‘til lunch. When’d you last eat, by the way?”

‘Conversational whiplash’ might be the best description of the brief informational overload she just got from that rambling explanation. That, or ‘thought vomit.’ Thus, it takes her a minute to process and respond to that last question. “This morning.”

“Prison rations?”

“Yeah.”

“Eurgh, okay, the last time you ate a _real_ meal, then?”

Mara considers this for a minute, “When we broke into the Bergmilla mansion.” She answers, truthfully.

“And that was…?”

“A while back.”

Elena sighs deeply, beleaguered, “Well, lunch’ll be soon. It’s almost midday, we’ll getcha something to eat then, yeah?”

“Okay.” Then, considering the course of the morning, “Thanks.”

“No problem, kiddo.”

So, Mara settles her back against the railing, taking in the view overlooking the rest of the ocean; the breeze whips her damp hair, breaking hard against her face. She should hate it, but after a week cooped up in a holding cell, not even its burn against her bruises could make her turn away from it. The ocean’s expansive and all-consuming and she feels the urge to lurch toward the horizon, to know what’s out there, what’s beyond the Marlena. Her parents had talked about fleeing the island, once, back in what feels like another life—where would they have gone?

But, like that, something shatters inside of her at the reminder of all that the archipelago had taken from her, at the reminder of all that the _Nobles_ had taken, all that the World Government and the Marines had allowed them to take, all that Sebastian had _just fucking handed them over on a silver platter so polished that it probably belonged to a goddamn Celestial Dragon._ Kana and Roran and Linke and Tank and Judas were probably still laid out on that wooden, blood-soaked platform, going cold, still chained together, their heads—

No. _No._ If she thinks about it, she may actually puke over the side of this ship. 

_That fucker, Sebastian—_

Nope, that’s a dry-heave waiting to happen. Think any more about that fucking _traitor_ , that fucking piece of shit, who betrayed them, who, after _everything_ they did to protect him, _everything_ —

She leans over, focusing intently upon the water splashing around the bottom of the boat. Just to be sure. 

“You okay, over there?”

“’M good!” Mara shoots back, collecting herself and settling to the ground. Safe topics. Safe topics. What topics are safe, anymore? Her entire world is fucking _gone_. Are there any topics that aren’t violent minefields for her brain and empty stomach? Other than the weather, of course, which is lovely, mild for this time of year, and completely insulting to the fact that she’s alone and crushed and _even more homeless_ than before, if that were somehow even _possible._

Well, that’s a topic she hasn’t touched on yet. Where’s she gonna go?

_Stomach’s not rioting. Seems safe enough._

It’s a valid concern, actually—how long would she be staying here? Bartholomew Kuma had offered to drop her at her aunt’s, but that presented a dilemma in and of itself: she’d never met her Aunt Gertrude, and, if memory served, the woman had been far older than her father, back when her parents were still alive. 

On top of that, there’s a possibly more-pressing matter: the branding on (what had once been) the fat of her right hand. The cursive lowercase letter ‘b’ had marked her as property of the Bergmilla family for the duration of the War, and should anyone, even Aunt Gertrude, put that proverbial two and two together, they’d come for her again—this time, likely with measures to subdue someone with her abilities. 

There’s also that voice nagging at her from the back of her mind, that laughs cruelly at every iteration of a peacetime life, and as much as she wants to pin her aversion from a trip to the Zelda Isle on a desire to protect her last maybe-living relative, that’s a lie, an out-and-out lie. 

With a weird amount of certainty, she knows, _absolutely knows_ , that after everything, after fighting the War and the Nobles and the Marines, that peace is for other people. Demanding it, craving it, needing it—peace won’t come to her, no matter how hard she pleads. Not after five years of constant conflict.

It would kill her.

She can’t stay in this country, though. She’ll either be recognized and executed, or go insane from the memories, or attempt (and fail, since she has no back-up) to raze the whole Noble district in a fit of insanity and _then_ get captured and executed. And if Roran’s getting his goddamn wish for her new lease on life, well, who is she to deny his last request? 

Which leaves her with one option: ask Kuma and his people to drop her off at another island, elsewhere, preferably far away from the Marlena Archipelago. They seem to be trustworthy enough to _not_ screw her over on this one, at least. She can find work as a bounty hunter, feed herself that way. Sure, there are probably other logistics to sort out, but she can do that on the fly, right? It’s not like she’s never had to scrounge for food or live hand-to-mouth. Only difference now is that she’ll be doing it alone. 

The wind changes direction and she’s hit in the face with the enticingly rancid smell of cigarette smoke. Elena stands in front of her, “Time for lunch, kiddo.”

With little other option, she follows her back into the bowels of the ship. 

\--

“A kid, you say?” Vice Admiral Monkey D. Garp leans back in his chair, mulling over the report details that seemed to only get juicier with each revelation.

Sengoku grunts an affirmative, nodding and leafing through the papers; Garp had taken an interest in the verbal report that had come in via Transponder Snail while he was occupying the spare chair in the Fleet Admiral’s office. By this point, he’d long-since learned to tolerate his more…excitable comrade. “He’s been taken into protective custody more for his developmental well-being than his safety, since the perpetrators were set to be executed earlier this morning.” 

He probably wouldn’t’ve ever personally taken an interest in this affair, were it not for the fact that Noble houses that had contacted him directly about it.

It had been an exhausting, embarrassing saga, if the most recent report from the Marlena Archipelago Marine detachment was to be believed. It had taken them over a month to capture the vigilantes who’d not only destroyed the Nobles’ Skyline Promenade, but murdered the local Captain stationed in the area. Worse still, it hadn’t been the Marines’ skill and dogged dedication that caught the perps in the end, but the confession of a horrified-sounding, ten-year-old ex-child soldier named Gurrey Sebastian. 

When the final report came across his desk in search of his signature, the boy’s contribution would be detailed. Press releases would be a different story, though. Censorship may be one of the more distasteful parts of the job, but there was no question to its value.

“He’s got a good sense of justice.” Garp intones, before grinning manically. “He’ll probably join the Marines, one day!”

Sengoku finds himself nodding absently in agreement. A kid like that would go far.


	3. Part I: Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something gets set on fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I missed my first self-imposed deadline. Guess that means I'm officially a writer now!

The mess hall is neither particularly spacious, nor well-lit, but instead possessed of an enormously high ceiling like every other room on this ship (which, Mara guesses, is due to the size of their leader; that man is built like a cabin). People bustle around unimpeded, chatting throughout the room in a low hum.

“Here, this way.” And she’s guided to a table over near a porthole window, unoccupied except for one…person?

The being’s skin is mustard-yellow, muscled chest bared easily through the half-open karate gi; it looks rough and scaly and could probably draw blood were it to make contact with human skin in the wrong direction. 

Almost in contrast, though, the being is possessed of a mane of luxurious, well-kept, silver hair, and a similarly-kept moustache that only serves to highlight the protruding yellow gills on his neck.

_Is…is that a Fishman?_ Mara had heard sketchy descriptions of monstrous Fishmen over the years, but, watching him calmly working through clumps of seasoned rice as they approach, she can’t say he looks especially threatening. 

Then again, after Bartholomew “Size of a House” Kuma, no one looks intimidating on this ship. 

“Mind if we join?” Elena asks as they draw closer.  
   
The being finishes his mouthful of food before he responds, “Please, sit.”

With a gesture from Elena, Mara follows suit, sitting ramrod straight with her hands in her lap and constantly examining the exits and the people around her (who, she notes, barely notice of her beyond a cursory glance or two).

“Mara, this is Hack. Hack, this is Mara. I’ll go get us some food, be back in a sec.” And she strides away, leaving Mara with the Fishman. 

“I hope you’re doing better, Miss Mara.” He intones with a polite smile after a few seconds.

“You pulled me out of the bay, right?” It would make the most sense, after all. A being that’s part-fish would be able to swim fast enough to rescue her, without ever coming up for air, and with sufficient time to get her to the ship without allowing her to drown.

Also, Kuma and Elena had mentioned his name twice in conjunction with her safety. That too.  
   
“I did.”

“Thank you, then.”

The Fishman shakes his head slightly, “I only did what was right. There’s no need to thank me for that.”

“Oh. Okay.” And honestly, she doesn’t know where this lack of conversation goes from here. So, she’s left to stew in her own lack of social skills while Hack goes back to his meagre meal. 

_Way to make a good impression, Stevett._

“Is that all you’re eating?” Oh, wow, and it’s like this day couldn’t get any worse, yet absolutely did. Because she’s lost control of her fucking mouth-brain filter, too.

But she can’t help but feel slightly disappointed that she won’t be able to eat something more substantial— Elena had gotten her hopes up. If her rescuer is eating so little, it looks like nothing much has changed from her last situation. 

Better than nothing, though.

“I ate a large breakfast,” says Hack, visibly unbothered by her comment.

“Oh.”

Elena takes this moment to save her, swooping in and placing a large bowl of soup on the table in front of Mara, “Here you go, kiddo. We’ll get you started with this, since you’re not supposed to gorge yourself when you start eatin’ regularly after a long time. Pace yourself, yeah?” Then she plonks down on the table bench without ceremony, and begins chomping on a thin-looking sandwich. 

It’s enticing. She’s not even sure what’s in it, but it’s probably the best thing she’s ever smelled. Fuck, if it’s poisoned, she won’t even be mad. 

So, she digs in, ignoring Elena’s suggestion. The soup tastes hot and as good as it had seemed and soon enough she loses track of time, sloshing it everywhere in her haste. Somewhere above her head, Elena and Hack continue their meals, carrying on a conversation about something Mara doesn’t care to know. Before she can finish the bowl in its entirety, Elena’s tattooed arm places another bowl in her line of sight and she easily continues to that one.  

Somewhere at the bottom of the fourth bowl of soup, she slows down enough to take stock of the people sitting at the table with her; Hack is gesturing about something with a frown on his face— she missed most of the conversation, so Mara wouldn’t know what he meant by a ‘tequila wolf’ (though her own limited experience with tequila makes her feel sorry for that poor creature)— while Elena nods, purses her lips, and wipes some ranch-looking dressing off the corner of her mouth. 

Just as she’s about to open her mouth to ask about the drunk wolf, a harried, singed-looking man runs up to the table, slams his hands down on the wood hard enough to make her jump and let her bowl clatter to the table (all her instincts are screaming, screaming so loud), and pronounces in an aggressive undertone, “Merick fucked it up again, Commander.”

For her part, Elena doesn’t look scared or concerned; rather, she looks miffed, like she’s stepped in dog shit. “What did he do _this_ time?” She groans through the last of her sandwich. 

“It’s on fire. Again.”

_“Again?”_

“I’m shocked too.” The man manages to deadpan while still sounding panicked. 

“First time for everything, I guess. And you need me…?”

“Commanding Officer.”

“Right, that.” Elena steps out of her seat and stretches out her back like a cat. Then, she pauses, brings her arms down, and looks right at Mara, “Hey, d’you mind stayin’ with Hack while I take care of this?”

“Uh,” she intones, removing her fingernails one by one from where she’d dug them into the wooden bench beneath her, now that the newcomer apparently isn’t a threat. “Uh, sure, yeah.”

“Great, thanks!” And the woman hurries out after the interloper, pausing to snatch a fire extinguisher from the wall by the mess entrance as they go.

She and Hack turn back to look at each other. “Sometimes I wonder what goes through that man’s head.” The Fishman muses aloud, polite smile still fixed on his face.

“That inventor?”

“Merick, yes. Wrangling Niles was certainly an endeavor.”

“Niles?”

“The machine he’s working on once came to life and tried to kill us all.” He recounts, sounding eerily calm about such a subject. “It insisted upon being called ‘Niles,’ receiving daily sacrifices of human flesh, and trying to set the boat on fire.”

“Did you?”

“Heavens, no. But it took a while to bring it down.”

Mara leans forward over the table, intent upon getting an answer for the question that’s been rattling around in her head for a while now, “Why do you let him keep building things, then? If he keeps fucking up that bad?”

Hack pauses, then responds, “Merick’s track record is…perhaps ‘spotty’ is the best way to put it. But each of his successful inventions has advanced our cause by leaps and bounds; without him, we might still be struggling. A sizable amount of our success is easily attributable to his good inventions.”

“So, you put up with it because he’s useful.”

“We do.” He agrees. “But more than that, he’s dedicated and gives his all to the cause, even when he creates something like Niles. So, while it can be inconvenient, we know that he’s trying his best for us and for the good of all.”

“You guys don’t sound like any army I’ve ever been in.”

The Fishman smiles again, this time flashing his razor-sharp teeth; even though she can’t detect any malice or ill-will in his eyes, she gets the solid impression that she shouldn’t fuck with him either. “We’re here to destroy the established order, Miss Mara. If we’re ‘just like’ any other army, it won’t work.”

“Oh.”

The intensity behind Hack’s expression retreats almost as quickly as it had appeared. Instead, he gestures lightly with his chopsticks at her bowl, “How was your soup? I hear the carrot-cashew is delicious today.”

She glances down at its near-disappeared contents, “I didn’t pace myself.” She wants to sound apologetic, but can’t muster it—the soup was heavy and tasty and the first meal she’d had since her world ended.

“I’m sure you’ll be okay. You’ve survived this far, after all.”

“I have.” She repeats, more to herself than to Hack. 

“Now, I have a question, if you don’t mind my asking.” 

“Uh, sure, yeah.” Elena may trust him, but Mara doesn’t, not yet. If she doesn’t want to answer, she’ll just lie. 

“Did the Marines not know about your Devil Fruit power?”

Her brain screeches to a halt. “Uhhh…” Now _that_ was something she hadn’t considered, not in the holding cell, not on the execution block, not at all. They’d all gone quietly when the Marine captain held a gun to Kana’s head, too scared for their leader, and once they’d discovered it was Sebastian who’d given them up, it’d all been about sticking together with their heads held high.

It was her own attempt to make a statement that derailed that plan. She _should_ be dead, after all.

But, the thing was, Sebastian _knew_. It wasn’t something she advertised—Devil Fruits were rare, after all, and if the Nobles could draw a line between the ‘missing’ Fruit from the War and the vigilantes running around the city afterwards, there would’ve been _problems_ —but the whole group knew that it was Mara who’d been force-fed the disgusting thing. 

So why betray them without giving her up? She _could_ hazard a guess, but…

“I…don’t know. I don’t really know.”

Hack scrutinizes her; she gets the feeling that while he doesn’t view her as an enemy or a threat, he doesn’t fully trust her. That alone makes her feel more relaxed, that they’re both on edge. She embraces it, allowing it to envelope her back into her comfort zone of suspicion. 

“Can I go back up top for a while?” If she can put some distance between her and the Fishman, rather than the three feet of wood of this table, maybe she can hash through the strange situation of her all-too easy escape from the execution. And, like her sojourn to the deck earlier had reminded her, it had been too long since she’d sat in the open air, unafraid.

Also, if she needs to review the orange contents of her lunch, it’d probably be easier to do it outside.

Hack stands. Mara follows. 

\----------

By the time that Bartholomew Kuma steps onto the top deck, night has fallen and the lights of the island are mere fireflies on the horizon, flickering out and in. 

“Good evening, Mara.”

The girl looks better than she had when they found her only hours ago, no longer soaked to the bone. Backlit by the lights on the upper deck, her face looks darker under the bruising; paradoxically, it already looks like the swelling’s going down. She’s resilient.

“Hi.” Mara intones mechanically from her spot against the jigger-mast, not taking her eyes off the distance; not the island on the starboard side of the ship, but the void sky and placid waters to port.

In the background, Kuma senses Hack and Elena slipping off the deck and back below, now that he’s arrived. He’ll find some way to apologize for effectively putting two of his best soldiers on babysitting duty. 

“Are you feeling better?” He ventures, hoping that she’s not going to restrict herself to monosyllabic responses.

“Yeah.” Her tone is dismissive, like she expects him to leave now that he has a response. “Thanks.”

Internally sighing, Kuma changes tack and folds his legs, sitting several feet away but within her line of sight, placing his Bible in his lap, “Have you given any thought to where you will go next?”

This makes her tear her gaze from the horizon, “I’m not going back there.” Something like gunmetal steel flashes in her eyes, daring him or anyone else to disagree.

“Fair enough. We will not make you go back.”

“Good.” She nods, visibly relaxing and turning back to port. “Just drop me off someplace else, then. As far away as you can.”

“I am afraid we cannot do that, Mara.” It’s a spectacularly _bad_ idea, dropping a clearly-traumatized child-soldier into a society where she knows neither the people nor the customs. Resilient or not, she’ll be dead within a year, either from starvation or execution.

“Why not?” She spits as she turns to face him again, muscles tensed and voice brimming with barely-contained anger. “Elena said I was free to go.”

“You are, but—“

“Then, let me _go._ ” 

Kuma wants to marvel at the gusto of her rage, a stark contrast to the fear of him that had been inscribed on her face when they’d met hours earlier. “That’s incredibly unsafe, Mara. We cannot, in good conscience, leave you alone without resources or aid.” He’s trying to the best of his ability to not _send an eleven-year-old to her death._

Her voice starts rising in volume, “Then, what should I do, then? Go back and die? That’s just as bad!”

“You may come with us.” He pronounces. This had not been part of the plan, but now that he thinks about it, that’s probably the safest option. “There are other children your age in the Army—“

And almost immediately, he realizes that’s the wrong choice of words, because Mara jumps up and begins backing away from him, panicked eyes on the tarp behind him. “I should’ve _known!_ I should’ve _known!_ ” The rage has begun intermingling with fear and Kuma’s kicking himself for his mistake. “All you wanted was another recruit! You’re just like everyone else!”

“That is not what—“

“No, no! No, fuck you! I’m not going! You can’t make me! Not again!” The shrieks are reaching hysterical levels and he silently wills his comrades to _not_ storm the deck at the sudden noise; the last thing she needs right now is more people to up the threat level she perceives. 

“Stevett Mara, please listen to me,” He drums his fingers compulsively against the book in his lap as he assembles his words. She’s paused her shrieking protests, so he plunges forward into the hastily assembled monologue while he still has a chance. “The Army is not just a military organization, but a Revolutionary apparatus. There are many noncombatants among us, including the children.”

“Liar!” She yells, raising her arms into a defensive position and bending her knees.

Still, she doesn’t attack, so he continues, rushing through the explanation. “The children in the Army are not sent out to fight, and have all chosen this path. They are the children of our soldiers, or those who had no other prospects and wanted to join. And we absolutely _do not_ —“ he stresses, leveling his gaze to hers, “—ask them to do anything they do not wish to do.” Then, as an afterthought, “We strive to be as different from the Nobles as possible, since we intend upon tearing them down.”

Her posture relaxes at his final sentence, and he hopes that he’s broken through. But the words out of her mouth are hoarse and absolutely do not assuage his concerns, “Help me do it, then.”

“Pardon?”

“The Bergmilla and the Corteed!” Her face has taken on a manic quality that at once scares and angers him only by its intensity; no child should experience circumstances that ever evoke such rage. “You’re a pretty powerful guy, and so’s Elena and Hack and probably everyone else here—we can rid that island of them all! I’ll help, and everything!”

“I cannot do that either, Mara.”

“You said you were here to help!” She rages, her voice rising again. “We were trying to destroy the Nobility and stop the injustices they commit against the people!” Kuma gets the distinct impression she’s quoting someone, but pushes that aside to focus on her words. “You said you were trying to do that, too!”

“Mara—“

“That’s what they died for!” Her eyes are shining with tears and he gets the impression that this particular tirade isn’t necessarily directed at him. “They died because the Nobles don’t care about anyone else, because they don’t see us as human! Because while they ate and drank and slept in beds, we were out there!” She jabs a finger in the direction of the main island. “We were fighting their War! We were fighting their War because they disagreed about a—” her voice cracks, “—a FUCKING LAMP and wanted their commoners to duke it out!

“And then they told us to fuck off when we came crawling to them, their loyal soldiers, branded—” she points at her right palm with her left index finger so he can see some kind of marking on her hand, and his blood boils yet again, “—with their names, starving, and dying, and sick! And that’s how they treat everyone!” She points her finger now at him, marching into his personal space and glaring at him right in his eyes, dropping her voice, “What kind of ally are you, that you’ll let it pass? That you’ll let them die—” and her breath hitches “—let them die unavenged?!”

It takes her a few seconds of breathing in his face like a livid bull before it seems to register that she’s been yelling at the man that visibly terrifies her. As Mara recoils, her invective finished and her fear and rage laid out for all to see, Kuma makes a split-second decision.

In what he hopes is a comforting gesture, he places one hand on her head. Under it, she closes her eyes and braces like she’s expecting him to crush her skull, but he lifts it and brings it down again without force and lets it rest gently. He feels her relax after a few seconds without a threat to her wellbeing and she opens her eyes. 

“At your age, with your experiences, crying is not a weakness, Mara.” He pronounces softly, hoping to convey that he doesn’t intend on retaliating for her rage.

It’s like watching floodgates burst. She tumbles back out from under his hand, to the deck, curling forward over her knees. “They’re gone. They’re all gone.” She mumbles through the tears.

“‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter heaven.’” He recites over her muted sobs, absently tapping his book again and silently scooting back to give her some breathing space. “Your friends are at peace, away from the tyranny of the Nobles. I am sorry that we cannot retaliate, but we do not have the resources to take down such an entrenched establishment. Not right now, anyway.”

She nods, taking gasping breaths to stymie her sobbing and rubbing at her eyes and nose with her forearm, “But you will, won’t you?” Mara asks from somewhere under her tears. “One day, you’ll be able to do it.”

“That is the plan.” Kuma thinks of all the injustices he’d been witness to, and the ones he’d only learned about secondhand, of all the ruin toward which the world was being driven. He thinks of Elena, and her home island, obliterated. He thinks of the people of the Gray Terminal, turned into refugees as a mere function of their existence. He thinks of the mistreatment of the Fishmen and the other nonhuman sentients, of the disproportionately nonhuman slave trade. He thinks of all of them, and others, who deserve true justice, not the broken facsimile served by the Marines. 

Bartholomew Kuma dreams not of these plutocratic and monarchic police states. 

“Kana—“ and she sniffles a few times before she continues, tears still rolling down her cheeks, “—our leader, Kana was convinced that we would find people outside the country who would back us up. Who believed in the humanity of all, not just those fuckers.”

“In the humanity of all sentient creatures. In a just world.” The world he and Dragon and Ivankov and their comrades all dream of, the one they work tirelessly toward. 

Mara rights herself, then steels herself long enough to look Kuma right in the eyes, even as the tears continue to flow. “You said the children don’t fight.” 

Her tone is unreadable, so Kuma takes her at face value, “Only if they want to when they’re adults. We believe in free will.”

She nods, then sits up straight as best as she can. “Then I’ll go with you.” Ringed by the red of her tears, her light eyes stand out, making her appear angrier and more set. “Let me become a weapon to destroy their whole system, so I can come back here when I’m older and stronger and burn them down.”

“Be careful you are not consumed by revenge,” he cautions. “There is more to this fight than destruction.”

“I won’t be.” And she bares her yellowing teeth in an uncanny mockery of a smile, her tears no longer flowing. “It’s just the fuckin’ icing on the cake.”

Kuma pauses, considering. Then, “Stevett Mara, welcome to the Revolutionary Army.”


	4. Part I: Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Various people raise legitimate questions and concerns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, my life’s gonna be a mess next week, and once i realised that editing and re-editing this chapter was giving me yet another excuse to procrastinate, I bit the bullet and posted it. But I’m in this for the long haul, I figure, and there’ll always be an opportunity to make up for it with better writing later on. 
> 
> If an update comes before the 20th, it’s because I’m focusing on this rather than the stuff that I ought to be.

“You’re kiddin’ me, right? Boss, she doesn’t need a fight, she needs _therapy!”_

Kuma sighs, watching Elena lean back with an aggressive bounce in the sparse wooden chair (his office is Spartan at the best of times), the remnants of cigarette smoke wafting out with each of her movements; the stench had long since soaked into her skin and her wild gestures serve only as a reminder to all her immediate surroundings of the habit. 

“It is her choice. And do be careful with that chair.” He intones, then wonders if discussing this with Elena first thing in the morning was the best decision. 

Then again, considering her unique perspective on this type of situation, he’s getting the same spiel, only slightly grumpier.

“Maybe she doesn’t know what’s good for her!” She throws her hands up, her face etched with disbelief. “She’s eleven!”

“Twelve, tomorrow, actually.”

If it were possible, her face takes on a whole new level of exasperation, “Fuck, like that’s any better!” She pauses, then notes in an audible undertone, “I’ll have to ask Frell to make something for her…”

“Would you rather we leave her to her own devices?”

“Fuuuuuu—“ and she drags out the syllable, tipping her head back and groaning it at the high ceiling, “—uuuuuuck no. But promising her revenge is gonna fuck her up, too. Hell, say what you will about that scrawny blond kid y’all picked up a couple months back, but he at least had some fuckin’ ideological reasons.”

“I do not disagree.”

“Boss,” and she leans forward, now with one elbow on each knee, her fingers interlocked, staring him down and dropping her tone, “Just, answer me honestly: Is this, based on everything we know, the best option?”

Kuma shakes his head, “She has one aunt that she refuses to contact for whatever reason, and I will not push her to do so. You witnessed firsthand what happened to her friends, and I will not turn her out on her own. Unfortunately, _it is.”_

The woman opposite him deflates with a beleaguered sigh, dropping her chin onto her hands. “Can’t we at least, fuckin’,” and her tone is resigned, “do _something_ about the fact that she’s basically a time-bomb of rage?”

“She may benefit from socialization with children her own age; given our available resources, that may be the only option. Do you think that would help?”

“Can’t speak from experience on that one. Better than nothing, I guess.”

He nods, glad to have some degree of her approval on this endeavor, and reaches for his tea. “Now, regarding the call you received while on watch.”

Elena leans back in the chair, changing tack and metaphorically wiping away the bulk of the conflict from the earlier conversation, “Standard intel fare, for the most part. Only one thing that stood out to me.”

“An overview, please. We can delve into the finer details after.”

His second puts up five fingers and begins counting off, “The Sun Pirates were spotted near, but not in, the Florian Triangle, for whatever God-knows-why reason; the Red-Haired Pirates are hacking their way back up the New World pecking order after whatever-the-fuck-absence they took—“

“How unbiased.”

She rolls her eye and continues, minus her editorializing, “—the Doflamingo Pirates have almost arrived at Saobody Archipelago, leading to a huge redirection of Marines to the area; the Kingdom of Lvneel is experiencing intense political instability after an intrigue by the youngest princess…”

“And the one that stood out?”

A grin, a full, yellow-incisor-bearing grin that makes her cheeks force the eyepatch up and off the skin, breaks out on her face as she puts down the final finger. “And Nico Robin escaped capture again after being sighted in Drackan, in North Blue.” Elena speaks with relish, like those words alone will power her glee for the next year alone. Knowing her, they probably will.

Kuma too, smiles. “Good news indeed.” Any day Nico Robin evades the Marines is a good day for the Revolution. Now, if only they could _find_ the girl. He prepares himself for the inevitable follow-up question, the one raised every time a report about the Last Scholar of Ohara crosses their path; when it doesn’t come, he deliberately raises one eyebrow at her.

Elena shrugs, “By the time we get there, she’ll have already moved on, and we’ll be back at square one. If we were in North Blue, though...”

He nods, then again takes a long sip of his tea. “What else do we know about the Lvneel situation, then?”

She fishes into her jacket pocket, “Well--” 

“Do not smoke in my office.”

“Worth a shot. Anyway…”

\---

_“Your last words, girl?”_

Mara jolts back into consciousness, swallowing her scream. The pallet is unnatural underneath her and the blanket feels weird and the next thing she knows, she’s tangled and tumbling. She lands with a muted yelp on a floor that isn’t dirt, having fallen farther than she’d expected. 

_Oh, right. I’m not in jail anymore._

_Ow._

Yet again, her knees had not escaped unscathed; they’re pulsing angrily and probably going to take more time to heal, now. At least she’d had the reflexes to brace herself with her arms as she fell; otherwise, she would’ve landed right on her face and all its tender bruises. 

_It’s the small victories,_ as Tank would’ve said with an optimistic laugh. The memory hurts substantially more than the sting in her forearms. Fuck, was it only yesterday? It feels like it’s been a month, at least. 

But this wooden floor, creaking under the pressure of her body, the slight movement of the ship as they sail away through the orange light of the early morning that streams through her window, the too-soft blanket tangled around her feet, the too-comfortable mattress—not a pallet, an honest-to-God mattress—on the bed, they’re all her reality, now. 

She’s going to be a Revolutionary, now. 

Mara extricates herself from the blanket and stands, padding over to the porthole window. In the nascent dawn sun, she can see seagulls diving into the crystalline water on the horizon, searching for their breakfast. The waves smack with force against the hull, sending up spray with a muted ‘hiss’ that just barely reaches the middle of her window.

Twenty-four hours ago, she hadn’t thought she’d see the morning sun ever again. She _knew_ she wouldn’t see it. But here it is, threatening to blind her as she stares it down. 

She turns back to the still-dark room with spots in her vision, and manages to amble over to the small table with a mirror and a washbowl on it. In the present lighting, most of her bruises seem to have faded; after a few seconds of deliberation, she finds a matchbook and lights a candle. 

_I look like a grape._ The bruises are less intense, and the bulk of the swelling has gone down; tender as it may still be, she just looks like she’s taken an unfortunate jaunt into some light purple paint. For good order’s sake, she pokes her face a few times, watching in a mixture of pain and fascination as the skin goes white, then pink, then back to purple. 

A sweep of the room confirms her assessment of it from the previous night: sparse, compact, but practical. There’s the bed, the small table she stands beside now, and an open, empty chest presumably for storing personal items (where she found the candle and matches). The walls and floor are the same dark-colored wood, and the porthole window and the door are on opposite sides of the four walls. 

It’s not a bad set-up. Hell, it’s the first time in her life she’s ever had her own room. She seriously debates going back to sleep; nightmares be damned, the mattress will take some getting used to, and she’s still bone-tired. And it’s not like she doesn’t live in a waking nightmare, anyway. 

Instead, Mara tosses her blanket back onto the bed and walks out the door. 

The corridor is empty; she slips almost entirely unnoticed onto the upper deck. Around her, men and women are shouting orders about the rigging, while others scale the ropes and masts to enormous heights, making acrobatic flips and movements to traverse great expanses without anything to keep them from falling. Backlit by the morning sun, with their hair and clothes blowing in the wind, they look like birds, swooping and diving far above her head.

A few of the people on the deck offer her polite smiles. The man at the ship’s helm, who’s missing his two front teeth, gives her a wave that she awkwardly returns. 

(She cringes at the memory of her rant last night as she passes the jigger-mast. She doesn’t regret the words, doesn’t regret that it’s given her a new chance, but crying _is_ a weakness, no matter what.)

She sits by the railing, under the space where her clothes are still drying, tilting her face to the sun, trying to soak up all the heat she can. 

“Sorry, missy, but...” And a crewmember, arms laden with heavy-looking objects is standing to the side of her. 

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” So, she draws her legs in and lets him go past. 

Mara’s just about to put them back out when a woman comes from the other direction, taking a dangerous flying leap over her head that seems almost dangerously close to falling into the water. She lands gracefully and continues hurrying toward the ship’s bow. 

_This is the wrong place to be right now._

So, after a minute or two of searching and clutching her head for dear life, she gets an idea: the space between the ship wall and the grey tarp of the lifeboats. The boats are crammed against one of the higher walls of the main deck, but there’s just enough space between them that a small person could fit in between them. 

Luckily, Mara is just thin enough for the task. 

A short leap gets her into the space; it’s a little cramped, but she’s been in tighter spots. Even better, the lifeboats shield her from the harsher gusts of salty wind, and the sun hits this part of the ship _just right,_ letting her close her eyes, lean back against the ship wall, and bask in it.

Just, _bask._

“The ship’s manifest!” A booming voice breaks through her moment and she opens her eyes, immediately getting hit in the eyes with the unnaturally bright reflection of the sun from the tarp. The tingling that’s dancing along her skin serves as a telltale sign of yet another sunburn; she’s been out here a while.

_Aww, shit, I fell asleep._

A glance to the sky at the position of the sun tells her that it’s probably after noon. To underscore it all, her stomach growls.

_Fuck, I should eat something._

“Where is the captain?” There’s that voice again; it’s imperious and it is not the first thing she wants to hear after awaking from a nap. This time there’s shuffling; it hits her now that it’s the only sound other than the splashing waves at the edge of the boat. 

Then, the click of heels on wood intrudes into the invisible soundstage. “Can I help you gentlemen?” Elena sounds annoyed—worse than yesterday, with Merick’s firey fuck-up. She sounds like she’s itching to bust heads. 

“Are you the captain of this vessel?”

“I’m the first mate. You requested our manifest?” It’s unmistakably Elena speaking, but her accent has changed. Right now, it sounds a hundred times more refined and a hundred times more forced. 

“For a caravel of this size, with—is this all of you?—a skeleton crew, I’m going to have to meet your captain. Navy regulations, you see.”

Mara’s blood runs cold, her breath hitching. 

As slowly and with as little noise as possible, she tries to peek around the tarp to get a better view of what’s going on. There’s a light Marine craft to port; Elena has her back to her, and is facing down a ship full of enemies. 

A hot spike ruptures her insides, built of the agony of the last week, of the last few years of dealing with the Navy; she wants to grab, tear, rip, _destroy_ those Marines, destroy _all_ of them, _all of them—_

“—not made aware of any such regulations. One of our sailors is fetching the manifest now.” The measured tones of the woman speaking to the Marines interrupts her internal rage monologue. “Unfortunately, our captain is ill with malaria. It’s highly contagious, he’s been laid up in bed all week. I’ve taken charge of the ship for the time being.” Okay, so Elena’s handling it with a heaping dose of lies. They’re trying to escape notice. Okay. Mara can work with this. 

Maybe she’ll get a chance to _crushdestroybreakannihilate_ them anyway. 

“That’s unfortunate, I’m so sorry.” Mara can just barely see the Marine who’s speaking. All that’s visible are his pristine blue Navy epaulettes. His companion is shorter, broader, appears to have light purple hair, and has begun sauntering around that area of the ship.

The latter Marine interjects, “Then, as the acting captain, I’m sure you’ll have to fire your ship doctor.”

“Pardon?”

“Malaria is not a person-to-person contagious disease. I’m sure you’ll rectify this oversight on his part.” His voice is a deep bass, easily distinguishable from the other man (who sounds more like a nasally squeak toy), and he moves to inspect the main mast of the ship. 

Mara slinks back down from her position leaning over the top of the lifeboats. The hot spike is back; that’s _not_ good. Small slip-ups could blow their cover entirely. She braces herself as best as she can in the cramped space; if she needs to scramble over and punch someone, she will.

Elena’s voice is cool. “Thank you for that, then. I’ll be sure to alert the crew. Though I do think this is overkill, stopping us.”

“Overkill, miss? Hardly.” The Marine with the bass responds, too close to Mara’s position for her comfort. “Smugglers and brigands are rife in this area! You cannot fault us for maintaining the safety of the seas.”

Someone else runs onto the deck; her heart speeds up. “Commander Monock, the manifest!”

“Ah, I’ll take that.” The Epaulette Marine pronounces; there’s a rustling of paper, and silence.

It feels like the boat itself is holding its breath. Mara regrets having climbed down from her vantage point, but remains prepared to jump, despite the protests of her knees. 

“The merchant ship _Golpe._ Your cargo is…”

“Lead ore, to be taken to Cozia for refinement.”

“Mined where?”

“Briss Kingdom.”

“And when were you in Briss?”

“On Thursday.”

“Briss is a three-day trip from here,” Bass Marine prods.

“We had to make emergency repairs. The hull was leaking—lead is dense, after all.” 

“Both Briss and Cozia are peaceful. You’re heavily armed, for merchants.”

“There are brigands out here.” Her voice takes on an edge. Mara feels her senses go on high alert. Elena’s control sounds like it’s slipping.

“It is indeed. We’ll have to inspect your cargo.”

“Of course, I’ll ask someone to bring up a chest.”

“I’m afraid,” and the Epaulette Marine’s tone makes Mara’s blood run _colder,_ because he’s not afraid and he’s not sorry and that’s the same smug tone that another smug Marine captain used when he held a gun to Kana’s head, knowing that they’d all stand down, “we’ll have to see your cargo in its hold below deck. You understand, I’m sure.”

He has them. 

“Is this truly necessary?” And, boy, does Elena sound _done_ with this whole affair. “For a merchant ship transporting ore? Surely the Navy has better things to do than--”

“Captain Wolfram is correct,” Bass Marine adds. “To confirm the veracity of your manifest, recent revisions to procedure allow us to examine your cargo in its hold. Now, will you cooperate?”

In the silence that falls, she can hear her heart over the splashing of the waves. It holds, longer than necessary, longer than she wants, longer than _anyone_ wants, a silence like nails on a chalkboard, like a drawn-out _snap_ of a bone, absolutely agonizing in its length. 

A sickly sweet, “Of course.”

And then the telltale _shwicks_ of knives piercing flesh. 

Mara vaults herself over the lifeboats, into the salty wind, at the moment the sound registers. Elena has stabbed the Epaulette Marine right through the throat, while another knife had caught Bass Marine through the heart; his eyes are wide and his mouth is open, spewing gurgles. It’s the face of a man who did not expect his death. 

“Goddamn new rules,” Elena mutters, livid. Then, at a louder volume, “Get their Snail!” With the toss of her blonde hair around her head and her jaw almost unhinged with the force of the shout, she resembles a grizzled, predatory cat. “They can’t know we’re here!”

Half the Revolutionaries on the deck that Mara hadn’t noticed in her rage myopia charge to the Marine craft. 

By virtue of her reaction time and against the strain of her knees, she traverses the short space between the two boats and lands on the Marine ship first, swinging around wildly, trying to get her bearings on this ship full of hostiles. 

_Oh, fucking hell._

She dodges a bludgeon from a Marine charging her down, using his over-swing and her short stature as an opening to deliver a punch just under his ribs, then hook the back of one foot under his knee, pulling him into collapsing backwards. For good measure, she runs bodily over him, stomping on his teeth and snatching the wooden club out of his hands as she goes. 

_Think later, fight now._

With a running start, she bounces off the railing and body-slams into another, grasping him around the neck and tearing her nails into its soft parts, then taking a swing at his comrade who attempts to intercept her. The first man goes down with a gargled shriek; his skin and blood is still on her nails, even as she dislodges it from his body to defend against his friend. Her swing had missed him, and he brings his own club down on her, missing her head by mere inches, but instead harshly clipping her bruised shoulder. 

She snarls, stars fogging her vision, but it’s the most alive she’s felt in a week and she _loves_ it, _loves_ the electric sensation. She leaps at him with the club raised above her head. Anticipating the move, he brings his bat up as if to parry it. Instead, she improvises, dropping the bat behind her and transforming in midair, sinking her claws deep into his chest as she lands. 

As the man tumbles, flailing vainly to dislodge her, in shock and pain, she spots the cadet with the Transponder Snail; to his credit, he’s not fumbling in panic in step with the frenetic state of the battle around. His hands, however shaky, still reach for the receiver. 

Transforming back and stepping harshly on the body of the man she’d just claw-stabbed, she breaks into a sprint, ignoring her knees, ignoring her lungs, ignoring every other sense that tells her to stop, just as she’s done a billion times before and will do a billion times again. She sees him tighten his grip on the Snail, and then turn tail and book it in the other direction, fleeing. 

He gets about ten meters before a blonde blur practically materializes with an enormous club and bludgeons him across the head with a clean swing, then kicks him in the ribs, off the side of the ship while he’s still stunned; he hits the water with an unsavory _smack,_ taking the Transponder Snail with him.

“Jeez, where was he even running to? This is a boat!” Elena complains to no one in particular, bringing her club across her shoulders with its remaining momentum. Then, “You doin’ okay, kiddo?”

Mara shoots back a grin, unable to hide her exhilaration, “Best I’ve felt in days.” 

“Welcome to the fuckin’ club.” Elena laughs, light and carefree, like they’re not smack in the middle of a battlefield on a Navy ship. “Back to work.” And they charge back into the fray; the older woman loses her club in favor of the knives in her holsters and begins carving a practiced, bloodstained path through the enemy. Mara takes a different tack, dodging in and out of Marines, clawing and punching and stealing weapons in the service of turning them on their owners, only to ditch them minutes later as they outlive their usefulness, ducking through battle stances to confuse the enemy. She takes clips and hits and punches, rolling with them, ignoring the stinging that rings through her body with each one. Some motherfucker has a mace—that weapon lasts the longest in her hands, largely out of the novelty of bashing skulls with a pointy ball on a stick. 

“What’re you, like, nine?” One soldier yells as he dodges it, and as she rolls out of the way of the bullets he fires at her. 

“I’m eleven!” She shoots backs, not entirely sure why she bothers to respond, but _God, does this feel good,_ does she feel _alive,_ her blood singing, her mind tunneling to the moment in front of her, her nerves forgetting her bruises, consuming her with _fightkillfightfightkill._

She transforms mid-lunge again, dropping the mace, this time sinking her claws into his neck and tearing; then she climbs down along one of his arms, taking care to _dig and dig and dig_ into his flesh down its length until he collapses backwards. 

In a brief pause as she extricates himself from his corpse, a short survey of the battlefield tells her that the tide is on neither’s side; even though there’s that weird paw-shaped balloon of air bearing down on the Marines and throwing them up and around like no one’s goddamn business (and _what the fuuuuuuck is going on there?_ ), and she sees Hack karate-chopping some fuckers through the fifth dimension, summoning seawater around his movements ( _don’t wanna piss him off, no siree_ ), Elena’s continued deadly dance of death punctuated by laughter, and the efforts of the rest of the Revolutionary forces who’d charged the boat, the Marines are still holding on, the tenacious bastards that they are. The _Golpe’s_ cannons must be in order, since she keeps hearing a boom and feeling the Marine ship rocking underneath her, but she doesn’t know anything about its supply of available ammunition or the target’s stopping power.

 _Let's try something else._

She sprints for her next target—three soldiers turning to look at her—this time flexing her muscles in an imperceptibly different way (she’d never quite figured out what the exact difference was, but it was there and she just, sorta, _accepted_ it), and she feels the growth in her limbs, the expansion of her fingers into claws, the disappearance of her skin and face under what that disgusting fruit had made her into. 

The soldiers nearest to her stop moving, horrified and disgusted. Next to them, the Revolutionaries stop; it’s a sudden ripple effect, as the battlefield just grinds to a halt, silent in shock, mouths on both sides agape and repulsed. Only the cannons keep going, pounding away at the hull of the Marine ship they stand on. One man drops his weapon to puke over the side of the ship; at least a few others look like they want to do the same. The soldier holding Elena in a headlock drops her in shock. The woman tumbles to the deck, similarly stunned. From Mara’s new height, she can see the unreadable Kuma on the caravel, agape.

Under her snout, she feels herself grin, knowing what they see—an oversize snout face and protruding long tongue, lengthened, over-sharpened scaly claws, ashy, demi-human legs, and an oversized shell. It’s all the features of an armadillo, in excruciating, too-much detail, jammed onto the barely-transformed legs of a human.

It’s a horror, it’s a monstrosity, it’s an abomination to behold, and she _loves_ it, _loves_ that this is the reaction every time she chooses this form. 

With her new legs, she charges down the nearest enemies, smashing them to the floor and stomping through them before she moves onto the next group. It’s tear, dodge, tear, _dodge rip tear dodge rip tear smash;_ around her, the battlefield takes up its previous fights with this beast in their midst.

She doesn’t know how long it goes on for, losing herself in the fight, feeling knives and bullets _ding_ off her shell, registering the occasional stray limb that lands on her underbelly, the tear of weapons hitting and slicing into her skin intermittently. It feels like only a few seconds pass before the call goes up, “Back to the _Golpe!”_

The muted stomping around her means that call is being followed; she doesn’t want to go, but she feels an unthreatening hand on her shell as she takes stock of the battlefield, near where her shoulder ought to be. “Mara,” and that’s Hack’s voice, calm and measured, and it’s that that makes her tamp down on the instinct to fight the limb. “It’s time to go.”

So, she follows him, back across the divide between the two ships, the last two to land on the deck of their caravel; she transforms back just as she hits the familiar deck with a roll. Almost immediately upon standing, a dark, frizzy-haired man in a lab coat blackened with burns shoves a machine the size of a human head into Elena’s hands.

“Wait, what’re you giving it to me for? My depth perception’s shot to shit!”

“You were doing fine earlier, just pull the cord and throw _fast!”_

“Oh, I hope you’re right about this.” She grunts, then pulls the cord and lobs it at the ship as it releases an aggressive _fizzzzzzzz,_ sailing through the air in a graceful arc. It hits the other deck, sinks into the wood through a hole of its own creation, and then disappears. 

“Merick—“

“Wait for it!” He cautions; less than a beat later, the wood of the craft begins warping, like it’s melting; then, a _boom,_ and the ship collapses in on itself, snapping in half down the middle and sinking into the sea, all in the space of about twenty seconds.

It’s the most effective erasure of _anything_ that Mara has ever seen. 

Someone whistles appreciatively, “Holy shit, Merick!”

“Yeah, _damn!”_

“Thanks!” The man laughs, scratching the back of his head. “Took a while, but I finally got it!”

“I’ll say!” Another woman snipes good-naturedly, and the inventor grabs her in a headlock, ruffling her hair as they all laugh. Mara even joins in on the laughter as the adrenaline filters out of her system. 

“Thank you, Merick.” Kuma’s voice booms from above them. “Now, before any other ships arrive, we must continue on.” A few of the fighters peel off, racing to the helm to join the noncombatants. 

A hand comes down on the top of her head, light and unthreatening. “You did good, kiddo.” Elena grins at her. “What the fuck was that, though?”

“Devil Fruit.” She responds simply, widening her smile at the woman. 

“Scared the fuckin’ shit outta me and everyone else, _damn._ Way to go, that got me an opening to punch that guy.”

Mara laughs, happy to be useful, happy to bust Navy heads, happy to get one step closer to the destruction of the Nobles.

_This is my reality, now._


	5. Part I: Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, we're gonna get to the characters y'all actually care about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When, last Monday, I told my Quality Control that I’d only written a page, she looked at me, and quite seriously said, “Because you actually did your damn work this week. I’m proud.”   
> So I banged this out by blaring the Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 soundtrack like a bajillion times and ignoring all my other work. Again.

In the ensuing chaos of fleeing the scene of the fight, Mara doesn’t have a chance to speak to anyone else on the _Golpe,_ other than brief directions toward the mess and the commands of “Eat something,” and “Get yourself checked out in medical, yeah?”

The concern for her wellbeing is almost still jarring. Scratch that, it is jarring. 

It’s only the next morning, when she’s made her way out onto the top deck to shake off the night specters of two days’ past ( _Oh, God, two days_?), waving at the man behind the helm and a few other people who’ve gotten used to her presence at the dawn, that anyone finds the time to seek her out.

“How you doin’, kiddo?” Elena yawns, and her shadow cools the spot that Mara’s occupied, this time on the exposed side of the lifeboats’ tarp, knees curled up to her chest. The woman looks dead on her feet, the bag under her eye purple, her shirt rumpled, her lips faded from red to pink, her fingers white with the force of clutching a mug in her hand like a lifeline. There’s a cut above her good eye that she sustained during the fight yesterday, but it’s since been bandaged even if the gauze _has_ turned brown. 

“’m good.”

“Mind if I join?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

The two sit in silence as Elena takes periodic sips from her drink, before giving up and chugging the whole thing, Mara eyeing her out of her peripherals while trying to look out at the ocean beyond the confines of the ship. 

“I friggin’ hate the night shift.” The woman grumbles after a few minutes, gesturing irately. “Avoid at all costs.”

Mara nods, not really taking the bulk of her focus from the sea. A lizard-looking thing—a Sea King, if she’s right—has surfaced far in the distance below the sun, snapping at the birds that scatter in its wake. It’s the first time she’s seen one, even from far away, and she’s mesmerized by its motions, entranced watching it dive back down below the waves once it tires of its game, swimming further into the horizon. The stray thought crosses her mind that she ought to get her old clothes from where she’d left them drying two days ago.

“How long?” The other woman’s voice interrupts the scene and Mara painstakingly tears away her gaze to focus fully on the question.

“What?”

“How long were you in the War?” Elena’s turned to look at her, mug forgotten on the deck. 

“A while.” Mara responds, without thinking too much about it, then repeats, “A while.” In truth, she knows how long. She knows every day, drawn out in front of her eyes at a moment’s notice. It’s the time before that blurs into itself like one of those fancy paintings she’d seen in the Bergmilla Mansion all greens and browns and blues and greys in patches and splotches. 

For a moment, Elena scrutinizes her. Then she nods, like she understands something. “So, you got any hobbies?”

“What.”

“Hobbies.” She chirps, sounding almost off-key. “Things you do for fun.”

Mara enunciates, incredulous, “What _I_ do for _fun?”_

“Everyone needs one,” Elena grins, eye twinkling with clear faux-sagacity.

She feels her face betray her, and despite her best efforts, she can’t keep her laughter under wraps, the whole thing’s just so ridiculous. “Fuck,” she wheezes through the sensation, through the euphoric rush— _how long?_ —“What’s _your_ fucking hobby?”

The other woman’s in a similar state, smile threatening to break her face, one cheek pushing the base of the eyepatch off the socket; Mara can see the bare outline of the damaged eye. “Book binding.” She announces as she composes herself. 

“What’s that?”

“I put books together.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Before my life went to shit, it was s’posed to be my job. I was apprenticed and everythin.’” Elena’s smile, while it hasn’t dimmed, has taken on a wry quality, like there’s a joke missing. “But you’d be surprised how much binding I’ve done for the Army. Win-win, honestly.”

“There’s,” and Mara can’t help the slight flip of her stomach at the thought, “a lot of reading involved?”

“Nah, just intelligence shit. Nothin’ too difficult.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“So, hobbies?”

“I don’t _have_ one.”

“Well, we’ll find you one sooner or later. 

“Why?”

“Can’t be angry all the time.” Well, Mara would disagree. “You eaten yet?”

She’s beginning to get the impression that Elena just jumps from topic to topic like a frog picky about its lily pad. “Uh, no. Not yet.” As if to underscore the sentence, her stomach growls audibly.

“Come with, I’m headin’ to breakfast.”

The trip to the mess is uneventful; some of the people striding through the hall wave, others don’t. When they get to their destination, the room is mostly empty—there are some people milling about, speaking in low tones over their meal or staring blankly ahead while they wait for their drinks to cool. She sees Hack sitting at a table near the entrance to the kitchen; he waves politely at them both. 

Elena ruptures the mostly-silence with the _clack_ of her heeled boots and the sudden call of “Frell! We’re here!” that makes Mara, next to her, jump a foot into the air. Merick and several other people—the ones staring forlornly at their coffee mugs—turn to glare at the woman instead.

“Not so loud, Elena,” Hack admonishes lightly as they approach his table, though there’s a tinge of amusement to his tone and a twinkle in his eyes as he takes a sip of his tea. Elena rolls her own and plonks down at the table with as much grace as usual (which is to say, barely any), Mara following suit. 

“The coffee is kickin’ in, my friend.”

“Are you quite sure it’s _just_ coffee?” The Fishman responds in a jovial tone.

“C’mon, that was _one time!_ I swear I’m sober!” But she doesn’t sound bothered in the slightest by the accusations.

Hack leans across the table to Mara with a conspiratorial gesture, “If she offers you her coffee,” he confides with a mock whisper and a friendly wink, “say ‘no.’”

Elena punctuates his sentence with laughter, throwing her head back. Mara stifles a giggle watching her—she looks like she’s having a good time.

“We plan on staging an intervention.” He continues in the same tone, nodding like he’s imparting the wisdom of his forefathers, an image easily contradicted by the laughing grin.

In that moment, the metal door to the kitchen slams open with an echoing _bang_ (and Mara’s nails go right into the wood of the table, _again, owowowow_ ) and a balding, middle-aged man with both a potbelly and a tattoo of a pink starfish that takes up most his left arm appears in its place, having pushed the door with his foot with far more force than strictly necessary. 

“One Waffle Deluxe,” The man booms—really, his voice is deep like one of those enormous metal horns that the Nobles basically abuse for their parades— “For our newest recruit, the birthday girl!”

_Oh._

(She dimly registers the end of the grumbling from the walking dead around the room at this declaration.)

_I should just stop saying things._

The man, presumably Frell, places a decadent tower of thick flour-based food doused in crème and mismatched and multicolored fruits on the table in front of her just as she removes her nails from the wood, jams a candle into the top of it (for which Elena promptly swoops in with her cigarette lighter), and suddenly, _there’s singing._

Even the Coffee Zombies join in. 

It’s not that she doesn’t like her birthday; on the contrary, she can’t help the warm and fuzzy feeling bubbling inside her stomach, the expanding balloon of emotion, that she’s getting even this little celebration for her birthday, that these practical strangers have given her food especially for the occasion. For the longest time, her birthday had only been a way to count the passage of time: three birthdays in the War, two after it, or something to that effect. She vaguely remembers celebrating birthdays before being conscripted, remembers them being a happy thing. Even on birthdays when she’d misbehaved and her parents had gotten angry with her, they still fit into the blurry tapestry as good memories. 

No, what worries her is that she’d let these people know more than she ought to have. She’d blabbed about her birthday—a personal detail—in a moment of weakness, and it had spread to others. Don’t get her wrong, she likes these Revolutionaries and their mission, and her birthday’s meaningless overall, but she doesn’t trust them any farther than she could throw them. Granted, she thinks she could probably throw most of them a fair distance (Bartholomew Kuma aside), but as it is, she trusts them just enough to not purposefully or directly screw her over on her own goals. 

So, when the singing ends and transitions into clapping, Mara plasters the genuine, happy emotions on her face, mentally squirrels away her misgivings for later examination, and acquiesces to the room’s chant of “Make a wish!” 

\---

Hack worries about their newest recruit. 

Stevett Mara is a reticent, malnourished, paranoid child; that’s not abnormal as far as children that he or the Revolution have rescued from hardship and trauma. In fact, he’d expected that. 

What concerns him is the ferocity she displayed during yesterday’s skirmish, not only as the beast form she took at the end, but as a herself. It would not be an understatement or a mistruth to say that she’d practically come to life in the heat of the danger, charging forth with vigor and glee, laughing with Elena, carving a bloody, ultraviolent swathe through the enemy.

In his own experience, he’s found that those—whether Fishman, Merman, Human, Giant, or otherwise—who only feel at ease during the throes of battle are those in most danger of losing their humanity (or, Fishmanity, as it were, or Mermanity— _truly, someone was going to have to think of a less humanocentric term for this concept_ ). This is a child who has been so long estranged from peace that war is a more natural state of being. And given that he teaches the more fighting-oriented classes and she’ll easily become one of his charges, it’s likely up to him to do something about it. 

He waits out the celebratory breakfast, sings along not insincerely to the room’s off-key rendition of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and prepares for the long haul, making light small talk with Elena as Mara stuffs her face with waffle. 

Frell, after an explanation of the dangers of scurvy to the half-attentive child, makes his retreat into the kitchen as more people arrive for breakfast. The others in the room filter out, and eventually, as Elena strides away with a wave, it’s down to Hack and Mara in a slightly louder mess, the latter literally licking her plate clean. 

“You fought well, yesterday.” He starts. 

She looks a little taken aback at the compliment as she puts the plate down, “Thanks.”

“Who taught you how to fight?”

“I dunno.” Mara shrugs and avoids eye contact to examine an indeterminate spot on her dish, “I kinda, I guess, picked it up. Either that, or...”

And that explains quite a bit. “You don’t have any technique. You fight like a feral animal.” Hack knows he’s prodding a sleeping dragon.

Predictably, the girl bristles with indignation, head snapping back up to glare light brown steel in her eyes. “I fucking _survived,_ I didn’t have any fancy training or shit like that. And,” and she draws herself up in her seat, like she’s proud of whatever pronouncement she’s about to make, “I _am_ an animal.”

Though, in his humble opinion, an armadillo is hardly an animal worth fearing, the sense conveyed through her light eyes is unsettling, that she not only believes in her own beastliness, but _relishes_ it. Her words may be objectively ridiculous, but he gets the impression that she’s honestly convinced of this. “What you lack in technique, you make up for in raw power.” He continues, hoping to abate her bubbling rage and make her listen. It’s not a lie in the slightest; even in a bruised, malnourished state, the girl is a powerhouse, if wild and largely untrained. “With training and discipline, you could easily stand on equal footing with even the strongest children back at base.” 

Like a switch has been flipped, he has her attention; she leans forward over the table, laser-focused on him and his words, “I can get stronger with technique?”

“It will take time, but yes.”

“But I will, right?” The grin that sprouts on her face almost makes him rethink the plan. “Teach me.” And, as an afterthought, “Please?”

Despite himself, Hack stifles a smile at the sudden earnestness in her tone.

In response, he stands up and back from the table, gesturing for her to follow him; he leads them to a largely deserted area of the upper deck. The sun’s still on its upward climb across the sky, illuminating the world around them with the heat of the morning sun. 

“We gonna spar?” Mara demands, examining the open space with interest. 

“Shortly. Right now, I want you to show me how you stand when you’re prepared to fight.”

The girl bends at the knees, right foot in front of the other, leaning forward, hands scrunched (though not clenched, _that’s_ interesting) and held around shoulder height, an odd determination set on her face. She’s visibly surmised the bulk of an effective battle stance, but there are, of course, places to improve. 

“Spread your stance to the width of your shoulders, you’ll balance better.” Elena had suggested that the best way to get through to a child like Mara is enunciated rationalization of all commands, so they don’t feel like they’re being tugged around and bullied; the advice seems to work, since the girl does so without complaint. “Bend a little deeper, it’ll give you more power to lunge. What’re you doing with your hands?”

“Means I can claw people.” Then, Mara pauses, examines her hands, purses her lips, and adds drily, “If I hadn’t left my nails in the table just now.”

Hack smiles a little, appreciative of her attempted joke, before continuing, “In that case, we’ll make do without clawing—make them fists, and raise them higher, level with your temples. This way, you protect your head.”

“Like this?”

“Perfect. Now, you’re going to get worse before you get better--”

_“What?”_ Under the sudden rage and indignation, he can hear hurt and betrayal; Kuma mentioned that she didn’t have a great handle on her emotions. They’ll work on that.

So, he explains calmly and quickly, “It’s the same for everyone—you, me, Elena, Kuma, everyone. It’ll take some time, but we have two weeks until we reach the base, and I believe that you’ll have it by then.”

Mara blinks and stands up straight, anger halted in its tracks, “Oh.”

“Which brings us to the second part of this lesson: emotional control.”

He expects her to snap again, but instead she flushes with embarrassment, “But what does that have to do with fighting? It always helped.” 

“Tell me something, Mara: who have you fought thus far?”

It takes a few seconds of silence, punctuated only by the cawing of seagulls overhead, before she practically whispers, “They weren’t really trained either?”

“You won out because, regardless of training, you’re a natural powerhouse. That was your advantage. Yesterday, we got lucky: they were grunts. But the higher-level Marines and others, they won’t be the same.”

“They’ll have training.”

“Exactly.”

“And you want me to control my emotions?” She ventures tentatively.

“Anger can be easily exploited by your enemies. It makes you sloppy, makes you lose the upper hand, and gives them the advantage.” Herein lies the crux of his plan: through focus on her fighting aptitude, force her to learn mental discipline. Once she has the framework, she can get a better handle on her emotions, and mentally depart from the animalistic mindset she’s taken on, balancing the body _and_ the mind. “Does that make sense?”

“Like…you don’t want it to be like when my brain whites out, right?”

“Exactly, yes. It will take time, just like improving your technique.”

After a few seconds of silence, she nods. “Okay.” She sinks down into the stance she’d taken before, visibly taking her time to incorporate his earlier corrections into the movement and slowly curling her hands into fists at temple height. She takes a deep breath. 

“Attack me.”

Almost immediately, all preparation and correction flies out the metaphorical window, and her lunge is messy, though determined. He easily swats her out of the air, back to the deck. 

She lands with a _thud,_ “Fuck!”

“You dropped your stance. Try again.”

So, she stands up, does exactly that, and he yet again beats her away, her reintroduction to the deck punctuated with a _thud_ and an expletive. The third time, though, she rolls back into a standing position and lunges, all pretense gone of trying to use what she’s just learned, and she gets in a swipe before he slams her back to the deck without much force. 

“I got through!”

“But that sort of attack will only take you so far. Technique is sustainable. Again.”

The next pass is more reliant on the new stance, and the subsequent ones are more successful at getting through his guard, though they still don’t come close to properly landing a hit. She does, however, consistently roll out of her landings instead of merely falling. 

She keeps trying.

Around the end of the first hour, Hack can see she’s getting angry and frustrated that she’s only barely getting through, trying though she may be. “Would you like to stop and pick this up again tomorrow?”

“Fuck no,” she spits, eyes wild. “We only got two weeks, right?” And after a deep breath, she lunges again, this time landing a hit and escaping the swing he takes at the same speed as before, rolling back into a standing position upon hitting the deck. “I did it!” She cheers, broad smile plastered on her face, actually jumping up and down with her arms raised above her head, “I did it!”

Hack smiles with her, proud that she’s gotten this far, that she’s proud of herself, that she’s displaying an emotion other than fear or rage or bloodlust. “Good. Now, do it again.”

\---

At the end of the first day, all her joints are sore from training with Hack; by the end of the second, twice so. Her teacher turns to meditation on the third day to give her time to rest her muscles and focus on her emotions when he sees her wince, but she squirms anxiously through all of that, less patient and in increasing anticipation of a return to sparring. 

Look, she knows she’s not _good,_ emotionally, she’s not a _complete_ moron—for fuck’s sake, she started crying in front of someone she’d only just met! But trying to get it under control feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

That becomes the routine: two days of intensive training, one day of meditative rest to recoup her muscles. Hack tries to get her to take longer breaks, but she won’t have it. It’s not like he’s going especially hard on her, after all; he’s hitting just hard enough to get the message through, not to seriously harm. But she doesn’t mind the use of force. 

Anything’s better than learning at the end of an electric cattle prod, after all. 

Elena shows up from time to time, either to trade harmless barbs with Hack while he swats Mara out of the air, or to jokingly (or seriously?) lob ideas for increasingly bizarre hobbies at her.

(“Aquascaping?”

“What the fuck is th— _shit!” Thud._

“Your stance was unbalanced. Try again.”

“Ooh, maybe Mahjong!”

“Elena, stop distracting her.”

“Wait, what _is_ that?”)

Frell subjects her to a regimen of more food than she’s seen in a long time, maybe ever, without giving her any more than anyone else receives; she never goes to sleep hungry. Merick blows something up below deck almost every fourth day, and his apologies and singed eyebrows are weirdly endearing. The gap-toothed man who holds the helm is named Franklin, and he waves her over to tell her about his daughter back at base, asks Mara to befriend her. Kuma sometimes takes dinner with them all, and his silence and small smile as he watches his subordinates make merry around him is strangely comforting. 

(The old, torn clothes she’d meant to retrieve from the deck railing are lost, carried away by the sea breeze like ratty, lost flags. Surprisingly, she can’t really find it in her to be bothered by it.)

Hack tells her she’s making fast progress, though she knows it’s not without her own failure. Around day six, the bruising on her face, shoulders, and knees fades out entirely, which is good, since that’s around the time that she starts landing on her face and knees as she attempts a new roll technique. 

They all welcome her, and Mara likes them, wants to trust them, really wants to. The two weeks she spends on the _Golpe_ are some of the best— _the safest_ —she’s experienced in a long time, even if she wakes every dawn by tumbling off her mattress in a cold sweat, the specters of her comrades’ last moments still haunting her, even if some mornings she can’t think about getting up to do anything productive without staring into the bright abyss of the dawn sun for a while, even if sometimes she has trouble eating without puking. 

The world keeps turning, the sun keeps rising and setting, and she’s still in it, against all odds. It’s strange, and it’s frustrating when she can’t get the technique right, and she still loses her nails in the nearest object almost every time someone startles her. But Elena’s kindly relentless in her attempt to get her a hobby (“Needlepoint?” _“What?!?”_ “Look, it’s practical!”), Hack has the patience of a saint while she loses her temper with her own failures, and when Kuma shows her his own Devil Fruit abilities, she waits until she’s safely back in her room at the end of the day to shed tears of mixed relief and horror, that she isn’t the _only_ monster, that she _isn’t_ the only monster. The routine she builds on board is comfortable, breathes energy back into her lungs and being that she hadn’t felt in a while. 

She’s happy.

The arrival at the base, at Baltigo, ruptures it.


	6. Part I: Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arguments, philosophy, and panic ensue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My life picked up. I have no other excuse. It's about to get worse too, which is why I'm posting this before my QC has a chance to read it. Again, The Long-Haul Rationale. 
> 
> I'd like to thank Getting Smashed After Infinity War, for giving me the kick in the pants necessary to finish this chapter. Nothing quite like an abject bloodbath and alcohol to break your writers' block. 
> 
> I'm gonna start setting more-definite deadlines. Expect the next one BEFORE May 29 (sorry, finals 'n shit).

The morning they’re supposed to arrive at Baltigo, Mara’s off-balance and dead on her feet. 

The night’s dream had been _bad;_ an infinite loop of horror and screaming and blood and helplessness that woke her every hour or so, no matter how valiantly she tried to go back to sleep. She’d been looking forward to spending her morning on the top deck—napping in the sun never let her dream—but it seemed, when she opened the door to her quarters, that _that_ wasn’t happening, either. 

“Mornin,’ kiddo.” Elena waves at her without looking up from whatever’s propped against her knees, coffee mug at her side as she sits, curled up, against the other side of the hall. With a flourish, the woman scribbles something on the object of her attention. 

Well, this is new. “What’s that?” She takes a step closer, vaguely curious. 

“Paperwork due today.”

“Paperwork?”

“Oh, nothing you have to worry about.” She glances up with a grin; the bag under her eye is less-pronounced today. “Hey, did you happen to catch the name of that other Marine, two weeks back? The one that wasn’t named ‘Wolfram’?”

“The one with the deep voice?”

“Yeah, that one.”

She wracks her sluggish brain for a moment, “Nope.”

“Aaaargh.” The woman groans down at the papers with an inflection that Mara can only describe as ‘frustrated deadpan,’ like she’s hoping that her tobacco-breath will force the paper to reveal its secrets, but also without holding any real expectations. “Well, I guess _that_ doesn’t matter.”

“Do you _have_ to do that every time you fight someone?” Because beyond the complicated acrobatics her insides seem to be doing at the mere thought, that just seems _lame._

Fuck, if she’d known _that_ was what she was gonna be in for, she never woulda joined. 

“Nah,” Elena shakes her head. “Only ‘cause we were tryin’ to be stealthy, and I got us into a fight. And imploded a Marine ship.”

Mara nods, feeling a little reassured. “Why’re you outside my room?”

“Because we arrive on base in two hours, and I’m gonna give you a rundown on what’s what.” The woman fumbles for her coffee mug, grimaces when she sees it’s empty, and begins fishing around in her jacket. 

“Don’t smoke inside.”

The woman pauses, eye comically wide, and after a beat, groans. “No!” Elena bangs her head back against the wall and flings one arm over her forehead, “They _infected_ you!”

She snickers at the dramatics, but defends herself anyway, “It stinks!”

The woman rolls her eye with a small smile and mutters something Mara can’t fully make out, then unfolds herself from against the wall and into a standing position, scooping up her mug as she goes. “Hack’s busy, so it’s just gonna be you and me for now. Wanna eat?”

Her stomach gurgles audibly; she’s gotten too used to eating regularly. Her limbs are marginally less bony than when she’d arrived, but she wonders how long that’ll last. 

“I’ll take that as a yes. Let’s go.”

Everything bustles around them as the whole ship prepares for their destination. People hurry around the halls, some carrying crates of supplies, others carrying weapons. Twice, Elena tries to jokingly foist her papers off on someone else; both times, she’s turned down. As they slink into the mess, a short-haired woman delicately carrying a decorative spear hustles by, blade hoisted to the ceiling and shouting, “Glaive, coming through!” to all passerby, looking very pleased with herself.

“So, the Army.” Elena begins over her plate of scrambled eggs as she hands Mara the ketchup, “Right now, we’re mostly working on recruitment and expanding, but as we get more resources and people, we’ll be able to break more shit.” Now, this sounds like _fun._ “The Big Boss is Dragon.”

“A _dragon?" Holy shit, how am I only hearing about this_ now?!

“Man, that’d be awesome.” Elena laughs, shaking her head, “He’s not an actual dragon--” _Damn._ “—but he’s scary and intense, and he really, _really,_ wants to stop the World Government. Super mysterious, too. Don’t ask him about his personal life, or his family, or really, _anything_ that isn’t work-related. He won’t answer, he’ll just glare until you leave.”

“I get that.”

“Same. And he’s got two lieutenants who report directly to him: Kuma and Ivankov. Fair warning, Ivankov is _a lot._ Like, _a lot. A lot.”_

“The fuck does that mean?” Mara demands through a mouthful of ketchuppy eggs. Then, “Sorry.”

“For the last time, stop apologizing, it’s nothin’ no one else hasn’t said.” Elena admonishes kindly but not without exasperation. “Ivankov basically never runs out of energy, and I don’t understand it. Apparently, it’s not even, like, a substance, he’s just like that naturally.” Her voice is rising in tone and volume, like this is a longstanding concern she’s been wrestling with for years now. “I don’t understand! How is he like this without caffeine?! It’s gotta be caffeine! Oh,” and she switches gears mid-thought like she always does, down to a calmer tone, “also, ask for Iva’s pronouns.”

“What?”

“His Devil Fruit lets him switch between male and female. Usually ‘he’ is an okay default, but sometimes ‘she’ is better. Some people are just like that. Be aware, yeah?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Awesome. Now,” Elena gestures with her fork, “Dragon, Kuma, and Ivankov all have people who report to them specifically, but beyond that, it’s a pretty flat structure.” At Mara’s look of confusion, she corrects, “There’s no set chain of command, really. Some people are have positions, but anyone of age could get a mission handed to them directly from the Big Boss.”

“What’s ‘of age’?”

“Age seventeen.” _Good._

“Okay, but isn’t that unorganized?” She asks, thinking about her time in the Bergmilla army, the complex Tier system they’d had to learn on the fly, the ways information and commands were compartmentalized and advancement was— “Actually that sounds better than the last one, never mind.”

“The idea’s to promote equality and allow movement through the ranks. It’s so you don’t remain a foot soldier forever if you don’t wanna.”

“So, why’s there a leader, then?” She’s not trying to pin Elena, really, she isn’t. But a leader sounds…not that. “Aren’t you trying to destroy leaders?”

“Dragon is a _de facto_ leader.” Kuma’s voice is quiet and measured as he sits down with them, plate of potatoes and vegetables in hand—Mara’s still confused as to how this enormous man fits in this seat at the table, or how he _doesn’t_ break that tiny wooden chair he’s sat upon. “Good morning, Elena, Mara.”

“Mornin,’ Boss!” Elena chirps, waving her fork.

“What’s ‘day fackto’?” The girl asks.

“It means ‘by default.’” He responds, tone patient. “The Revolution was his idea, but were we to lose faith, he would step aside. Please pass the ketchup?” Elena obliges as he continues, “Leadership should be derived from the consent of the governed.”

_Uh…sure. Whatever that means._

“Basically,” the other woman picks up, “We’ve all agreed that Dragon’s the best choice for leader. Plus, he’s really good at listenin’ to everyone, even if their ideas are stupid. Hell, he’ll even tell you when it is.” She turns to Kuma, “Remember the Time Machine?”

The giant chokes on his meal briefly, snorting an unexpected laugh. “I had nearly forgotten that, thank you, Elena.”

“How could you? Best morning of my life!”

Mara laughs along with them, not entirely sure what the joke is, but too fatigued to avoid being swept up in the good mood. She spaces out shortly thereafter, once Elena starts asking Kuma about the paperwork she’s been avoiding; it sounds dry and she _really, really_ hopes she doesn’t have to do any. 

After a while, she slinks off to the solace of the top deck; but there’s no point in napping now, not when they’re so close to arriving. With a cursory wave to Franklin and the others she’s come to recognize, she runs laps under the sun. Her endurance has improved in the past few weeks, between training and food, and she finds herself taking longer to start to feel tired. 

(Each time those screams echo through her mind, she pours on the speed to outstrip the noise.)

It’s almost funny that she’s trying to tire herself out to wake up. 

\---

Kuma’s always thought of Baltigo as a bizarre little island, even by Grand Line standards. 

Like all others on this part of the planet, the island is subject to seasons; unfortunately, there are only two. When they first arrived, one soldier termed them, “Frozen Hell” and “Sweat Tundra,” and the names stuck. He wasn’t wrong; the drop off between the two is practically immediate, with little (if any) transition period between the extremes. The only constant on an island previously deemed “uninhabitable” by the World Government was the howling wind that made the waters choppy and unstable all around the perimeter. 

Land of Mysteries, as outsiders called it. That alone makes it a fitting spot for a Revolutionary hideout. 

There had been native inhabitants, once; whoever they were had long since been lost to time (or, rather, eradicated by hands other than nature’s, if Elena’s theory is right), and the Army had taken up residence in what remained of their settlement. Most of the coastal city had been flattened by the elements, but the rundown fortress, farther inland, was an expansive Godsend. They could easily fit the entire operation and more into the building, modifying only the interior to avoid arousing suspicion from passing ships that might stray too close. 

Franklin navigates them expertly through the waters as the first blast of hot, dry wind hits them and billows the full sails; it seems in their five-week absence, the season had switched to Sweat Tundra. The _Golpe_ handles easily, fighting and plowing through the waves to the inlet that provides a path straight to the fortress. It looms into sight, their meticulously-kept crumbling ruin, bluewashed stone towers that once pierced the sky, blunted and lumpy under the wind. 

“Whoa.” Mara has come to a stop next to him, gaping at the edifice in perhaps a mixture of awe and confusion. 

“It’s nicer than it looks,” he finds himself saying. The girl doesn’t take her eyes off the structure, but nods anyway. The child looks hale and no longer pseudo-skeletal, almost unrecognizable from when they’d first found her; he’s glad. Hopefully, she’ll find her own niche within the Army, one that can balance out her more radical and violent impulses. Hopefully they can hammer home that she’s safe with them. 

The current drags them not unhelpfully downstream to the sheltered harbor at the base of the castle. As they approach, he can see the tiny specks of people scurrying around on the battered parapets; when they finally make it to the covered dock, there’s a small welcoming party. 

The combined mass of the group is twenty-percent purple hair. 

“Kuma!” The voice is distinguishable in any given circumstances; had, for some reason, he gone deaf, he still would’ve been able to recognize the hair and ostentatious makeup from a mile out, “After your long absence, you have returned!”

He allows the smile to grow on his face at the sight of his old friend, yellow-and-purple-striped jumpsuit and all. “I would hardly call a month ‘long,’ Ivankov.”

“But an absence nonetheless!” Ivankov rebuts as the gangplank is thrown down from the ship. The welcoming party hustles up the ramp to the deck; the air is rent with the greetings they share with their returned comrades. Elena starts directing people all around to offload their cargo; the first person down the gangplank is still shouting about her new glaive and bee-lining straight for the armory.

“I can’t imagine you were just waiting for us to return.” He says as Iva steps onto the deck, handily avoiding a few sailors laden with a chest of supplies.

“Of course not.” His friend laughs. “But I was passing through when they said you all were on the horizon. After all, who doesn’t like a welcoming party?” 

His reply is cut off, however, when Mara butts in, “You’re Ivankov?”

“My reputation precedes me!” He crows, unconcerned by the sudden appearance of the child. “But of course it does! How can it not?” He does a twirl and comes down into a split. 

Kuma can’t imagine how this looks to Mara; having known Iva for ten years, this no longer fazes him, nor does he remember what that had been like, to be fazed by his antics.

“Wow.” The girl breathes, just barely loud enough to hear, “She wasn’t kidding.”

Immediately Iva pops up, indignant, “Elena! Have you poisoned this tiny child against me?”

Mara’s quick snort of laughter is drowned out by his second’s voice, coming from somewhere on the other side of the ship. “All I did was give her a heads up!” She rounds a corner and comes into view, crate in her hands, grin on her face. “You come on too strong, sometimes!”

“Nonsense!” And he presses one hand to his heart, staring off to the side like he’s a character on the cover of a pulp novel, “I am absolutely astounded by your accusation! Never, in my life, have I heard such cruel words!”

Mara’s watching the exchange like a tenez match. “They're always like this?” She asks Kuma as the two keep trading barbs, having somehow jumped to the topic of caffeine and other drugs. This is not new. 

He thinks of the extent to which Ivankov went to help Elena when they’d first found her, the fact that Elena specifically sought out Iva when she’d lost her eye, and their weird subsequent comradeship. “Not at all.”

“Oh.”

Hack comes up on Kuma’s other side. “I see these two have reacquainted themselves.”

“Indeed.” He acknowledges, his tone fond. 

“I’m going to return to take charge of the students. Mara, would you like to come along? It’s nearly time for morning conditioning.”

She hesitates briefly before nodding, “Sure, yeah.” And with waves in Kuma’s direction, the two disembark from the ship, Hack’s assertive strides matched by Mara’s less-confident ones.

He gives it a minute more, supervising Merick as he offloads explosive substances, before raising his voice, “If you both are quite done,” the bickering grinds to a halt, “I am going to report to Dragon.”

“Gotcha, Boss, I’ll come with.”

They leave the rest of the crew to unload, trekking through the oil lamp-lit halls of the fortress to the room Dragon has long since claimed as an office. Ivankov, citing a standing meeting with their leader, comes along as well. 

Kuma knocks thrice on the appointed door and is answered with a gruff, “Enter.”

The room is made of the same bluewashed stone that comprises the rest of the base; combined with the two medium sized windows on opposite walls, the room gives off the sense of being well-lit and spacious, even though it’s hardly bigger than most other rooms on base. The sides of the walls are plastered in maps and charts, marked up in red quill, Wanted posters littered amongst them. It’s bizarrely organized, but Kuma has yet to decipher the system.

Dragon’s wooden desk takes up most of the room, its surface covered in neatly stacked papers. In front of it is a set of chairs that he and Ivankov immediately take; Elena, as per usual, cranks open the east window, propping herself against the wall next to it, and lighting up a smoke, holding the cigarette out the window in the meanwhile. Unlike on the _Golpe,_ their leader doesn’t care if she smokes in his office. 

Kuma covers his nose with his hand and tries to avoid the smell of tobacco anyway.

“Welcome back. I trust you had a safe journey.”

In person, Dragon has always been reticent with his emotions and utilitarian in his words; Kuma knows this is as close to a warm greeting as they’re going to get. He doesn’t pry (though he must admit he’s curious), but he guesses that his comrade’s upbringing placed a heavy emphasis on sublimating open emotionality. 

“Relatively uneventful, yes.”

“Good.”

“I take responsibility for the ‘relatively’ part.” Elena announces, all business; the rustling of paper indicates she’s taking it out of her inner jacket pocket. “One Marine scout ship, zero witnesses.” In easy strides, she walks over to the desk and hands over the paperwork, before returning to the window and the lit cigarette she’d left.

Dragon looks them over briefly, making eye contact with Elena and nodding his unsmiling approval. He puts the papers down, “Your new recruit, Kuma?“ His second had explained the situation over the Snail several weeks ago; they’d had his approval for some time now.

“Hack has taken Stevett Mara to join the other children.”

“Hm.” He nods again. “Then, if there’s nothing else—“ and he pauses to allow the three of them a chance to interject—“we were discussing the Lvneel situation.”

“Look at the intelligence report,” Iva begins for the benefit of the returnees. “It’s unlikely that the new Queen will be anything but a despot.”

Elena finishes a puff before asking, “Hasn’t she promised food to the people and slaughtered half the country’s Nobles? That’s bound to make her popular.” 

“Don’t they all?” Ivankov returns with a dismissive wave. “Her previous politics don’t exactly inspire faith.”

“The fact remains,” their leader muses, looking thoughtful, “that she risks the wrath of the World Government by rejecting their intervention.” 

“Careful, Dragon,” Kuma counsels quickly, before this can spiral out of control. “Can we afford to ally ourselves with an ideological opponent for the sake of our common enemy?” The fact that their leader is venturing suggestions on this matter means that his mind is not entirely made up, and Kuma intends to defeat this toxic idea before it reaches fruition.

“Elspeth _would_ have resources we sorely need.” Elena wonders aloud. _“And_ is willin’ to say ‘Fuck the Marines.’ We could at least open a channel to her?”

“But what would that say to smaller resistance movements within oppressive regimes who are looking for aid? Would that endear them to us?” He adds calmly, though Elena and Ivankov looking like they’re gearing up to get into it. 

Dragon nods, acknowledging the point, “But could we not use her resources to expand our operations?”

“Lvneel isn’t stable right now, not in the aftermath of a coup!” Iva rebuts, gesturing aggressively. 

“Couldn’t we just overthrow her if she gets too powerful?”

“Elena, we’d have no legitimacy!”

“And those resources would be hers, regardless.” Kuma adds, settling in for the remainder of the debate, as his second loudly hacks out a cough that cuts her rebuttal short. 

\--- 

Hack coulda frickin’ warned Mara that they would be running laps later, back when he saw her shortly before they arrived off the coast of this wind-nightmare island, but _nooooo,_ he _didn’t,_ and now she’s running laps. Again. She’s not out of energy or anything, but it’s hot like a dry oven out here. The Marlena was at least humid. This is just crap. 

And running fucking sucks, no matter the reason. 

There’re about thirty kids in this cohort that Hack’s thrown her into; it’s a point in these people’s favor that although they vary in ages, none look much younger than her.

_Good._

She feels kinda bad for having already forgotten the name of the girl who introduced herself first, because once Hack had told them to hurry and run their laps, that surge of energy that had been slowly working its way back into the marrow of her bones decided to rear its head and she was off to the goddamn races.

Give Hack some credit, though, running laps into wind like this— _holy fuck, what are these winds?_ —is gonna build a lot of strength. 

She stays solidly within the group of other kids for the first few laps or so, but after a while, they start breaking into packs by endurance. A few edge ahead; with Hack’s comment about her potential ringing in her ears, she presses on, joining them. Most of this group look to be several years older than her; a few of them nod a silent greeting at her as they keep pushing on. 

It’s as they’re entering the final lap that one of the group pushes out in front; there are a few annoyed tchs from the teens around her as he fully overtakes the group, so she speeds up just enough to catch up. 

(That gets an ‘aw, not _another_ one!’ from one of the teenagers they outstrip. It makes her grin.)

The wind’s gotten stronger and she can see him visibly struggling, even as he presses his advantage; she’s not doing much better though, tears forming in her eyes from the wind buffeting her face, her exposed skin stinging with windburn, leg muscles burning with the unexpected exertion.

_Fuckin’ change direction, dammit!_

She gets her wish; by the time they hit the home stretch, Mara’s knocking elbows with this kid but unable to push out in front of him, even with the assist from the wind at their backs. 

They tumble across the starting line when the wind changes again, skidding to the red-brown dirt ground in front Hack (who is somehow standing tall without looking bothered by the winds); she feels a layer of skin tear up over her knee from the force of the friction. Her lungs are on fire—this kid can fucking run. The others are still far behind them, left in the literal dust. 

“Nice—“ he’s hunched over and panting too, _good,_ “—race.” He sticks a hand out to shake, which she takes, finally registering her competitor for the first time. 

He’s a scrawny, blond shrimp of a kid, probably her age, wearing faded fancy clothes that, in their original state, wouldn’t’ve been too out of place on some of the lower Nobility. Kid’s got a cape and everything, too; likely, he salvaged it after it was thrown out after a single use. She used to do the same thing, after all. 

“My name’s Sabo.” The kid smiles; the grin takes up the bulk of his face, reaching to dark eyes, one of which is marred by a very angry, very recent-looking burn. 

_Jeez, between this kid and Elena, are eye injuries normal in this kinda shit?_

_Fuck, I don’t wanna lose an eye._

Weirdly, there’s something about his face that boils her blood, something familiar that she can’t quite grasp; the only other thing that’s made her so mad at a glance is looking Nobles in their entitled, privileged faces, seeing those over-fed, high-cheek-boned, spoiled monsters. But this is the Revolutionary Army. There’s no way that this kid could have anything to with them, not with faded clothes and a burned face, not without an obviously pompous demeanor.

So, she brushes it off as fatigue and annoyance for the moment; she’ll solve the mystery later. “Stevett Mara,” she answers, shaking his hand and releasing it as the last of the cohort comes to a stop at the finish line.

The girl from earlier—muted green hair, brown eyes, pointed and tan face littered with tiny scars, visibly the same age as Mara—materializes with a, “So, that’s your name!” She’s still panting loudly, having been one of the last to finish the laps, her exclamation punctuated by wiping her sweaty forehead on the inside collar of her splotchy-looking t-shirt. Her grin threatens to split her face, like she’s positively delighted to learn about the newcomer in their midst. 

Almost sheepishly, Mara realizes she never gave—Tella? Taura?—her name earlier. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that.”

“It’s cool, don’t worry!” She chirps as best as she can, “We can—“

But whatever they can do, she never finds out; Hack cuts them off, “Katas, everyone!” Mara finds herself very glad that he’d put her through that training on the boat, because the whole group of kids jumps to attention like reflex. The green haired girl gestures to a spot next to her as everyone spreads out, ignoring the wind to the best of their abilities (though now all her hair is in her face, _great, why haven’t I cut it?_ ) and following Hack through the katas. 

As she spent the voyage coming to grips with, katas are _not_ her strong suit. Either her form is messy, or she loses patience with the stance they’re in, or both, really. The fact that the winds on this island rival the winds on the high seas doesn’t help either. 

Once the group begins cycling through set patterns, Hack begins walking amongst them, critiquing or complimenting form. If there’s one thing she learned from her personalized training with him, it’s that he’s a very fair teacher. She half-focuses on her katas while eavesdropping on his comments on others; as many teenagers are corrected as complimented, while a lot of the kids Mara’s age are given comprehensive corrections. The girl next to Mara—Terra, which, if memory serves, is the name of Franklin’s daughter—is hilariously unconcerned when told that her form needs work; instead, she exaggerates her movements and makes stupid faces at the newcomer, trying to get her to laugh.

(She nearly loses her balance on an easy kata, snorting at the silly gestures Terra makes, balanced on one leg and flapping her arms in the wind like an oversized, panicked bird.) 

Luckily, she pulls herself back together by the time Hack comes around to inspect her form, “Good. Just remember that stance we talked about, Mara.”

“Okay.” She grimaces at the reminder of her shit form, readjusts, and watches him nod in approval.

It’s when they’re working through the hardest one that she hears, “Very good, Sabo!” from the other side of the group, and she can’t help the twinge of annoyance that flows within her, especially as she loses her balance and brings her foot back down to steady herself with a muted yelp. 

_Fuckin’ katas. What fucking good are these gonna do me? Who the fuck uses a kata in a fight?_

They continue like this for God-knows how long, until Hack directs them to head indoors. Terra beelines for her, “Finally!” She sighs, face turned to the sky, long hair blowing in all directions around her. “My thighs are killing me!”

Personally, she doesn’t think it was that bad, but appreciates the attempt at conversation anyway, “You’re tellin’ me. What’re we doing now?” 

“Oh, classroom time!” The girl laughs, scratching at one of the scars near her right ear. “Anything’s better than being outside in this heat!”

Mara’s stomach’s down in her feet, now. “Huh?”

“Like, history, and languages, and reading and stuff. Easy stuff!” She pauses briefly, before adding, “I mean, I guess you’re good at all this physical stuff, so you might not like it as much. But don’t worry, we have lunch afterwards!”

_Oh._

There’s no way Mara’s making it to lunch. 

Not if a classroom stands in her way.


	7. Part I: Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goddamnit, Mara.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, finals, moving, and traveling happened, and then I got sick. The whole month of June was a write-off. I wanted to stick to a schedule, but shit happens. Suffice to say, this isn’t dead. This is very much alive.
> 
> Parts of this were really hard to write because I’d had this very particular image of this chapter when I started, and then I realized I couldn’t go through with them based on story-flow. 
> 
> Other realizations from writing this chapter: I have read a lot of 19th-century political economy in my time. 
> 
> I will try to get at least one more chapter out by the end of July, but right now I’m exhausted and going to get back to reading my biography of Joseph Stalin. Y'know, something light to cleanse the palate.

She’s never seen this many books before, not in her life—rows upon rows upon rows against the far wall, stacked and towering to the rafters in faded browns and greens and reds, crammed in muted and battered bookcases that looked to be overflowing. 

It might honestly be for the best that her mind’s able to only process her inner monologue’s series of panicked noises. Otherwise, she’d have to register, more than just distantly, that Kana and Linke would’ve _killed_ to be in a room like this.

(For a moment that she relives every night inside the walls of her head, it still feels like it’s been a damn eon since she pitched herself off that cliff.)

Terra gestures her toward a pair of desks in the back of the room as they all file over to the section of tiny tables in haphazard rows; her new friend ( _friend?_ ) takes the seat closest to the bookcase and, with a quick glance around, snatches one out and opens it in her lap below the desk. 

Mara mechanically follows suit, though doesn’t bother to take anything from the case; most of the other kids around her don’t either, instead passing back pieces of loose parchment from the front of the class, followed by a variety of pens. 

When she regains her ability to think in normal sentences, she leans in to Terra, “What’s goin’ on?” 

“Dictation.” The girl chirps without tearing her eyes from the book in her lap. The page closest to Mara is a lush painting of bright greens and blues, but the other girl’s focusing on the miniscule dark lines of ink on the opposite page.

“What’s that?”

“Teacher says something, we write it down. It’s mostly just for practice.” She finally looks up, placing a finger under a line over halfway down the page, “You can read and write, right?”

“Of course I can!” Mara half-snaps, but reigns the volume in at the last moment to avoid calling attention to herself. Some of the older kids turn away very quickly when she glances around furtively, apparently watching the exchange. “I meant,” and _jeez,_ even _she_ can hear the strain in her voice, “what’re you reading?”

“ _Climate and Climatology._ It’s about the patterns of weather and environment across the known parts of the Grand Line. It’s the first thing I picked up.” The girl either didn’t notice her brief outburst or is doing a great job ignoring it; regardless, Mara appreciates her for it. 

“Alright, children, settle down!” A harried-looking dark-haired woman maybe ten or twenty years older than Elena shuffles into the library, opening an enormous folder. She glances maybe once at Mara, registering the newcomer in their midst (if anything, this seems to make her shuffle her papers with more urgency) and quickly soldiering on. “We’re doing a short dictation today, followed by Free-Read.”

Next to her, Terra fist-pumps under the desk and puts away her book, finally taking some parchment and a pen. Several older kids in front of them straighten up in their seats. That blond shrimp, Sabo, stows a book thicker than their instructor’s face under his chair in the front row.

“A brief passage,” the woman begins, running a hand through her unkempt hair, her pronouncement met by the silent roar of quills raised in unison over parchment, Mara one millisecond behind, “from _On Modern Plutocracy,_ by Glanville Milroy:”

(Terra gasps, and out of the corner of her eye, she can see that the other girl’s enraptured by the words the woman hasn’t yet spoken, her hurried tone aside.)

“’For the Nobles, those great Haves, wrest what they possess not from the fruits of their labor, but from the fruits of the labors of Have-Nots. When did you last, thoughtful reader, see a Nobleman tending to his own fields, on his hands and knees, sweating under the hot sun? Or travailing alongside his employees in his shop, blackening his hands with the exertion and the grease? Or climbing into the mineshaft, destroying his lungs, perhaps never to return? No, they are the men atop horses and walls, behind gilded fences, calling down plague and misery upon the common man, starving and wringing him dry, working him to the bone while they grow fat and complacent off the profits and the rents.’” 

_Kana would’ve loved this book._

The woman pauses for a minute or so, then repeats the passage. “Check over your work, put your name on it, and I will collect them.”

Sabo hands his paper to the instructor first, with confidence visible even from the back row. Terra adds dots to her letters with a pronounced flourish and leaves her seat to hand hers in. 

_Oh, fuck._

She knows, _knows_ that whatever’s on her paper is wrong, just by having glanced at Terra’s for a mere second. Hers doesn’t have anywhere near as many little lines at the base of words, has fewer lines altogether, probably spelled everything wrong, and she doesn’t even know what a ‘ploo-tock-rasee’ is. She knows what that passage was saying—has seen it in action, has lived it—but could’ve said as much without sounding so long-winded and stuffy. 

( _It’s not fair!_ But nothing about her life has _ever_ been fair, so she smushes down that piece of useless commentary.)

With more and more kids getting up to hand in their papers and Terra returning to her seat, Mara thinks she can feel her face getting redder and redder. 

“Don’t worry about it, it doesn’t mean anything,” the other girl whispers with a smile that she thinks is supposed to be reassuring, but honestly just sorta _isn’t helping._

With the instructor’s intent eyes on her and the sound of a foot tapping against the tiled floor, she finds a second wind. She’s going to hand over this damn paper. So, with a series of deliberate movements, Mara stands up and out of her desk, holds her head high and back ramrod straight, ignores the sensation of thirty pairs of eyes searching for any exploitable weakness, and marches the too-long walkway of five rows of desks, her squeaking shoes echoing off the bookcases around them. 

“Finally. Thank you, Miss—“ and before Mara can even turn away and begin her funeral march for her lost dignity, the pathetic thing gets resurrected and shot again, “Well, it seems you haven’t put your name on this.”

“My name?” She repeats, dumbfounded. 

“Your name, yes. Does anyone have a pen?” The lady announces to the whole room—Mara hasn’t forgotten they’re there, not by a long shot. 

Because he’s sitting right in front of where this exchange is taking place, Sabo produces his and hands it over with a kind smile that shows his cheekbones (the passage zooms back into mind like a mechanized boomerang) and she could hate him for those two things alone. 

She kinda does, actually. 

But she takes it with a nod, slams the paper down on a nearby desk that _isn’t_ his, scrawls S-t-e-v-e-double-t, M-a-r-a below her work, shoves it back into the hands of the lady, and power-walks back to her seat next to Terra. 

“Now, I have an urgent translation project to take care of—Anders will be in charge for the remainder of the time and will make sure you all get to lunch.” And she gathers up her papers and speeds out without a glance backward, a process that, in Mara’s humble opinion, took too long. Almost immediately, the room is awash in conversation and the scraping of chairs against tile as some grab books from the walls and others reach for the books under their chairs. 

“Don’t worry about it,” the other girl whispers, tone deliberately light, “She never has enough time to properly grade everything, so you’ll get a good one no matter how you do.”

Mara feels herself go red again; she takes a breath and tries to remember Hack’s advice about emotional control so that she doesn’t end up clawing this girl’s eyes out. “Is it all over my face?”

“The panic?” Terra shrugs, “Only somewhat. Don’t worry, everyone gets that way about grades, you’ll be fine. Just pull up a book and relax. We’ve got another hour.”

She picks the first book whose title she can read in full: _Iris and B,_ a thin, hardcover book without images on the cover.

But because nothing ever is _that_ simple, the cover lied. 

She can read some of the smaller words inside, but it feels like she’s trying to piece together a broken vase based on the two largest—but least important—pieces. Iris and B are apparently pirates, traveling the world as members of an infamous band of pirates, but that’s all she can tell. Iris is very wordy and speaks with a whole host of big, long words that end in ‘-tion’ and ‘-ure,’ while B, the one telling the story, talks in long blocks of text that blur together in front of Mara’s eyes, no matter how hard she glares at the page. 

It takes her almost an hour to ‘read’ eight pages, something she only realizes when Terra shakes her back to reality for lunchtime. 

\--

He wound up reading a book about the physics behind explosives; mostly out of genuine curiosity, but also in the vain hope that it could jog a loose memory in his brain. Instead, he got to experience yet another one of those intermittent headaches that happened every time he thought about the incident in Goa. 

Honestly, considering what Dragon has told Sabo of their brief interaction prior to The Incident, it might be best if he never remembers. He likes who he is now, likes his adopted cause. 

(A part of his brain that still remembers—but not consciously, never consciously—tells him that there’s something worth remembering, something _important,_ something painfully out of reach.)

He sits with the usual few kids during lunch—they get along, but don’t really talk. They tend to distance themselves, since they don’t want to be lumped together with the one that the older kids glare at, for one reason or another. That’s fine by him, mostly, since he can kick all their asses. 

(It’s really grating.) 

More than idly, Sabo wonders if they’ll treat that scrappy new kid swimming in baggy clothes and a rats’ nest of hair the same way. She kept up with him in warm-up, after all—maybe she’ll do the same during sparring sessions. Then again, warm-up counts for little in the real world; he knows that with a weird certainty that he’s sure is related to Before. 

When they’ve all finished eating, Hack collects and leads them to their usual sparring room, well-lit and indoors, but still close enough to the outer walls of the building that they can hear the howling of the wind through the padded thick stone.

The warm-up goes by fast enough; he keeps half an eye on the newbie, but Terra’s monopolizing her attention, goofing off per usual. Some of the older kids—Anders and his friends in particular—look on as well, sizing her up, wondering how she’ll fare. 

“All right, pair off!” Their teacher calls out; seems like they won’t have to wait long to see Stevett in action. 

Terra immediately snatches the newbie’s wrist (the latter looks only somewhat confused by the whole thing), and Sabo gets paired off with a former street urchin a year or two his senior who sits amongst his lunch group. She’s not much of a challenge; wiry and quick though she may be, Sabo’s faster and his reflexes are altogether better. Within a minute, she’s laid up on her back on the combat mat, one of his knees lightly placed just below her sternum, a hand by her neck and the other curled into a fist and drawn back for a blow that will never come.

She accepts the hand he proffers when he lets her up. “Left side was open?”

“Wide open.” He responds with what he hopes is a wry—but not unkind—smile. 

She turns away and stalks to a different opponent. Business as usual, it seems. In the interim, he glances around; of note, Anders has wiped the floor with one of his friends, (and Sabo almost thinks to venture over there and challenge him), while Terra lounges carefree on the floor, Stevett idling over her.

The decision isn’t really all that difficult. 

“Hey,” and both whirl in his direction as he approaches, the former mildly curious and deigning to open an eye in his direction, the latter schooling her features into a more-blank visage. “Mara, right? Want to spar?”

The girl in question draws herself up to her full height—a feat, considering how twiggy she is, “Yeah, sure.”

Terra takes this as her cue to roll—literally, the girl doesn’t even bother standing up—out of the range of fire. “I’ll ref.” She chirps to neither of them in particular.

“Good luck.” He holds out his hand to Stevett to shake. 

Stevett considers it for half a second before taking it and pumping his arm once before dropping his hand, “Yeah.”

They take a few steps before they’re about a meter apart; he drops into a stance first and watches her follow suit, cataloguing the jerky movements she takes. 

“On my mark,” Terra drawls. “Fight!”

Immediately, Sabo blocks a punch to the left side of his face, just barely fast enough to catch it. There’s far more force behind it than he’d expected from a girl so slight, and his miscalculation allows her to push him back a foot, even though his stance is solid on the ground. He dodges the second swing aiming for his sternum, by dropping down and swiping her legs out from underneath her, taking advantage of the clear weakness. 

Stevett lands on her back with a thud and a pained release of wind, but before he can move to trap her, she plants her foot in the center of his chest and kicks; when he goes to grab her ankle to immobilize her, she twists hard onto her stomach and rolls away, out of his immediate range of attack. 

(Hack had, he thinks distantly, tried to teach them that very move shortly before he’d left on that mission. It had resulted in four twisted ankles and people too scared to do the same in the pursuit of escape.)

Still, he pushes on, moving into her space and hooking his heel into Stevett’s knee as she stands up, knocking her back again to the mat (letting out a tiny, almost reflexive _‘ooo’_ as she starts to topple). This time she grabs his arm in her fall—and her nails dig deep into his skin _owwww_ —and flings him off to the side, using the momentum to swing herself on top of him, pinning his legs and reaching for his arms. 

They make eye contact for a split second and he gets the impression that the girl he’s fighting is only half-there, like her mind has begun vacating the premises in the past few seconds. Sabo grabs her shoulders and launches her off him, hoping to break her pin entirely; instead, she lands on his shins—he grunts in pain, straining down a yelp—and rolls forward, trying again to grab his arms. 

Like that, Stevett loses her firm grip on the upper hand, and he takes that brief slice of time to twist in his position on the floor, throwing her off and leaving them both to scramble to stand again. This time she gets there first. How does he know this? Because she uses the moment to bum-rush him, winding him both on the strike and on the landing. 

He does, however, manage to dodge the blow that would’ve hit him in the face once they’re both horizontal on the mat. The thud of her punch is met instead by a muted _hiss_ through her teeth; good thing he dodged that one. 

The weird blankness and her too-strong punches aside, this is the most fun he’s had on the mat in a long time. She’s better than any of the other kids, even Anders (who’s gonna _hate_ her at this rate). Her escapes from his grip are increasingly innovative, keeping him on his toes.

The spar keeps going, longer than any he’s had in a long time; they’re evenly matched. He dodges most of her strikes (though a particularly painful one clips his shoulder and _that’s_ going to bruise), while she dutifully breaks his every attempt to pin her, one way or another. They amass a silent, marveling crowd of spectators, which he notices out of the corner of his eyes between swinging around Mara’s flying strikes. He wants to see the look on Anders’ stupid, annoying face, watching this twig girl admirably holding her own against him. 

He exploits her stance again—it still isn’t perfect, but he’ll gladly help her work on that—and Sabo propels himself forward into her space, feeling her punch miss the tip of his nose by a nanometer, pinning her legs under his knees, and catching the arm recovering from the punch. The other arm, which goes to wrench open his grip with painful _painful_ nails, he catches and adds to the first one, pushing them to the mat above Mara’s head. 

She breaks the pin on her legs and starts moving to unseat him, but he readjusts, driving his knees into the joints connecting her legs to her torso, ignoring the muted grunt of pain from his opponent. It’s not the most sustainable position, but it’s immobilizing; raising his arm above both their heads, all he’s gotta focus on is holding it for long enough. 

“3…2…1…” Terra’s voice slices into the scene, tone disappointed, “That’s a match. Win goes to Sabo, like usual.”

Sabo breaks the pin and rolls off—good thing too, since there was no way he could’ve kept it up; in a real fight without a ref, she probably would’ve been fine. The crowd around them begins to disperse, having watched him wipe the floor with yet another new kid. 

For her part, Mara has yet to stand, curled over on her side and panting from the force of the exertion. Poor girl’s probably wiped. 

“Hey,” so he approaches her, hand extended, “That was a good spar.”

She slowly picks her head off the mat and turns to look at him; she’s taken up residence behind her eyes again, but it’s different, somehow. The new look in them knocks loose some lost part of his mind with a single, sure imperative: _run._

Mara reaches for his hand, grasps it firmly and pulls herself to her feet. 

And Sabo’s face explodes. 

Before he can open his eyes against the pain of his nose—probably broken—he takes another punch to the sternum, this one flinging him across the room and into a thankfully-padded wall. 

Whatever instincts he had failed to heed suddenly blare to life inside his mind, red and ringing like he’s never heard, dormant, trained savagery that he _knows_ has something to do with Before, all screaming that this _isn’t_ sparring. Amongst them, there’s one fully-formed, coherent thought: 

_This bitch is a sore loser!_

The next punch drives straight into the padded wall, and Sabo’s _sure_ it’s only by the divine intervention of some deity or another that he’d reacted fast enough to dodge it and move out of her immediate attack range. The padded wall is cratered by that punch, and some still-coherent part of his mind that isn’t focused on surviving Stevett’s onslaught wonders if she’s _actually trying to murder him._

The next swing is not a punch, but a semi-closed hand, slicing nails through the fabric of his shirt and drawing blood from a bruise she’d already given him during sparring.

_Yeah, she’s trying to kill me._

_What the fuck?_

Wherever this second wind had come from, it’s a barrage of rage and violence that hadn’t been present during their brief match. It’s a cornered tiger at the base of a mountain pass, unwilling to go down without a fight, not in its own domain. 

(Where did that comparison even come from? He’s never even seen a tiger, much less a cornered one!) 

Stevett sweeps his feet out from underneath him in the exact move he _swears_ he used on her earlier (though he _did not_ strike that hard, it was a goddamn spar!), and slams him to the floor, pinning him in a crude facsimile of the end of their earlier, friendlier match.

She looms into his swimming vision; Sabo tastes the blood that’s still trickling out of his nose. “Surrender,” she rasps, so close he can feel her breath. 

_Alright, y’know what?_

And with all the force he can muster, he slams his forehead into _her_ nose; she releases his arms to grasp it in shock and it’s all the opening he needs to flip their positions, this time choosing a different, more sustainable pin to hold her. Hopefully he can talk her out of whatever the hell she’s doing once he's got her in one place. 

She looks him dead in the eyes, nose bubbling with blood, and snarls. 

Then she’s gone. 

There’s still a creature under him, but not Stevett; it’s at least three times her size, and it’s _disgusting._ He’s perched on its stomach and gets a horrifyingly close-up look at its snout (still oozing blood), its beady eyes, its mottled and indented shell. 

_Stevett ate a Devil Fruit._

_And she’s an armadillo-person._

_Lame. What can an armadillo do?_

He’s flung through the air by this monstrosity; apparently, _that’s_ what it can do. 

Sabo hits the padded wall at the other end of the room; within seconds he’s on his feet, launching himself at her, arm wound back to strike. 

_This bitch…!_

He never gets there; instead, he’s plucked out of the air, unable to continue forward. Hack has him by the collar; where has he been this whole time?

“That’s enough, Mara.” Someone else pronounces, standing between them and Stevett; it’s that scratchy-voiced blonde woman who works with Kuma, the one who got gored in the eye with a screwdriver. “Fight’s over.” 

\---

“So, lemme get this straight,” Elena massages her temples, tone exasperated audible over the droning hum of the mess hall. “You’ve been here for less than twenty-four hours, and you _already_ have a mortal enemy?”

“I guess?” Mara fidgets in her seat, uncomfortable under the woman’s gaze. Her nose still stings even though the bleeding’s stopped; unlike Sabo’s, hers wasn’t broken. “I don’ like him. His face pisses me off.”

“I really hope you understand what that sounds like.”

“Wha?”

“Never mind. You attacked him because you think he’s better than you are, right?”

“N-no! H-he’s a prick!”

“You _just_ met him.”

“He thinks he’s so great!”

Elena gets a look on her face that Mara can’t read, but she does get the impression that the other woman _really_ hates this conversation. Somewhere deep in her gut, for the whole debacle, the fight, the trip to the infirmary, and now this, she feels just the slightest twinge of guilt. 

“Kiddo, you need therapy.”

“I’m fine!” Mara snaps. 

Elena looks completely unfazed. “You can’t take your problems out on your comrades.” She shakes her head, “Look, we’ve all been through some shit. Hell, I’m only alive through sheer spite by this point. But you can’t attack someone just because you don’t like them, especially if they're on your side. Maybe he was trying to be your friend?”

“He’s got a face like a Noble.”

Elena draws back, visibly shocked; for a split second, Mara thinks she’s said something _really_ wrong. “That’s a new one. God knows he’s not—Kuma said that _Dragon said_ that he first found him on the streets, raging about the Nobles. And he’s here now because he got shot outta the water by a Celestial Dragon.” She shrugs, “I dunno, I wasn’t there for that mission, but Dragon’s not about to take in random-ass Nobles.”

“…I still hate him.”

The woman mutters something, eyes to the ceiling of the mess hall. Then, flicking her eyes back, “Y’know what? Eat your Tuesday Meatloaf, please. We’ll work on this, but after food—I’ve been arguin’ with idealists all day and that gets exhausting.”

Mara waits a few minutes, shoveling pieces of loaf into her face; it’s not bad by any stretch, she’s just never had it before. Then, tentatively, “Can…can we try that needle thing you wanted me to try?”

“Sure, kiddo. ‘Bout time you chose a hobby.”

\---

“Are you okay? I know it’s been a bit rough for you, these past few weeks, but I want to make sure that you’re adjusting. You’ve been through a lot, and I just want you to know, I’m happy to talk.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lodge,” Sebastian nods, smile fixed on his face. 

“Please, dear,” Marie-Rose Lodge steps into his (new and too-spacious) room with a telegraphed movement and a precision that only serves to remind him that her family has a long history with the Marines, “There’s no need to be so formal, since you’re staying with us. If you don’t feel comfortable calling me ‘Mom,’ you can call me “’Marie.’”

“Thank you, Marie.” He repeats.

Marie-Rose, if Sebastian’s not wrong, is in her early fifties; her children are all grown and out of the house, Marines themselves. It’s probably why the Marines placed him with her and her older husband, a now-retired Vice Admiral who enjoys gardening and reading the newspaper aloud.

(It was from former Vice-Admiral Lodge (“Call me Harold, please.”) that he learned the fate of his comrades; all six dead, one by her own hand. He’d had to flee the room when he heard, his insides in danger of emptying themselves there and then; Marie had found him in the bathroom and rubbed his back until he’d feared he’d dry-heave his stomach through his mouth. 

_I didn’t want this! I just wanted them to stop hurting people! I didn’t want this!_

He could see it, still sees it in too-much detail in his mind’s eye, all of them, their carcasses laid out for the world to condemn. Mara, her tiny corpse left to a watery grave, washed out from the main island by the tides, never to be seen again…

He didn’t want this.)

“Marie?”

“Yes?”

“I think I might become a Marine, when I grow up.”

The smile on her face is suddenly blinding, “In that case, we have to work on getting your letters up to scratch, young man! Why, when I was in the Marines, I had to write a lot of reports…”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. Remember when I said I’d never write an OC again? Those were some famous-fucking-last words. This chick didn’t leave me alone until I let her have a backstory and whoops my finger slipped and now we have an OC story.
> 
> I’m ashamed, but I’m also not ashamed at all. 
> 
> If you’re interested, expect updates on Tuesdays. It’s thematic, that way.


End file.
